Sunflower sutra

Ginsberg’s “Sunflower Sutra” was written in 1955 during Ginsberg’s time in Berkeley, California. It represents many of the themes that Ginsberg would take up throughout his career. It’s overarching message is one of a desolate American landscape, destroyed and devastated by the careless work of modern society. But, unlike Ginsberg’s other poems, like “America,” “Sunflower Sutra” ends with a glimmer of hope as Ginsberg proclaims he will preach a “sermon” of light to all that see only despair in their country and their lives.

Ginsberg titles the poem as a “Sutra,” a Buddhist form of literature in which a string of aphorisms compose a body of work. An aphorism is a kind of quick line - spoken or written - that uses wit or humor to state a deep seeded truth. Ginsberg’s poem is more complex than a simple Sutra, however, though by titling the poem as such he means to suggest that the message of the poem is really quite simple.

The sunflower has many representations throughout the poem, but it means to finally suggest an America that has been tarnished and battered, but contains the ability to be redeemed and to be beautiful once again. In fact, the sunflower still holds the form of beauty inside of it, an Aristotelean view of beauty, and that beauty can shine forth if only people expand their thought to understand it as such. In this way, America and its core values - freedom of expression, progressive political and social thought - contains the inner form of beauty. Ginsberg sees himself, in the line of Romantic poets, as a prophet whose job it is to show this beauty to a country that has become rotten at its core.

In the line of Ginsberg’s prophetic poems - a style based on the Hebrew Bible’s prophetic literature in which a person is called to proclaim God’s wrath to an unfaithful Israelite nation - this poem could be considered Ginsberg’s original vision that calls him to a prophetic life. “America,” and parts of “Howl” contain the threat of wrath on an unfaithful people. But in this poem the reader sees the initial rays of hope brought forth and recalled in Ginsberg’s vision of a Romantic society that rejects industrial blight and accepts the beauty and natural power of the world as it has been originally created. The last lines of the poem even take on the form of a sermon or religious message, further exemplifying the prophetic nature of Ginsberg’s poem.

The form of the poem is in the continuum of Ginsberg’s other poetry based in the long line - a form that he found to be most conducive to the message he wanted to convey in his art. Each line does not contain a specific number of beats or syllables but is instead meant to move with the rhythm of breath. The poem uses short bursts of stanzas interweaved with two or three lines that express a moment of enlightenment or truth. In this way, Ginsberg’s poem becomes a Sutra.

Sylvia Plath

Tulips

Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963) was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. Born in Massachusetts, she studied at Smith College and Newnham College, Cambridge before receiving acclaim as a professional poet and writer. She married fellow poet Ted Hughes in 1956 and they lived together first in the United States and then England, having two children together: Frieda andNicholas. Following a long struggle with depression and a marital separation, Plath committed suicide in 1963.^[1] Controversy continues to surround the events of her life and death, as well as her writing and legacy.

Plath is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for her two published collections: The Colossus and Other Poems and Ariel. In 1982, she became the first poet to win a Pulitzer Prize posthumously, for The Collected Poems. She also wrote The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her death.^[2]

Confessional poetry emphasizes the intimate, and sometimes unflattering, information about details of the poet's personal life, such as in poems about mental illness, sexuality, and despondence.

"Tulips" is one of American Poet Sylvia Plath’s better known poems. The dark themes adhere to what is regarded as Plath's style. Plath shares with readers through metaphor and diction her profound emotional stress. The poem may target wives and mothers, as it pertains to the specific emotional stress that these individuals may face in daily life. Perhaps the most predominant image in the poem, Plath equates her duties as a woman of her time as both tiresome and challenging.

In the poem, the speaker finds herself moving towards the freedom and purity that lies in death, symbolized by the hospital’s whiteness; however, the vivid redness of the tulips, which represents the living, colorful world, forcefully pulls her back to the painful reality.

These symbolic uses of colors, explore the speaker’s ultimate desire to be free from a life filled with the bondage of her loved ones and her profound responsibility as a wife and a mother.

In the poem, whiteness represents freedom and tranquility to the speaker. While the speaker is lying on the hospital bed, she is "learning peacefulness" in her silent freedom. The whiteness of the hospital room’s walls, of the nurses’ caps, and of the pillow on which she rests creates a world of serenity and stillness that separates her mind and physical body from her miserable reality. As a result, she feels herself detaching from her social and moral duties. In the speaker’s mind, the whiteness around her is so pure that she feels like “nobody” in it. She wants to "[have] nothing to do with” her husband and child and their hurtful “little smiling hooks." She yearns to reach for the liberation from life and to fall into the eternal peacefulness. Through the admiration and experience of the whiteness, the speaker expresses her intent to die.

As the whiteness stands for the liberation that the speaker seeks, the redness of tulips acts as the reminder of her burden and responsibility in the world outside the hospital room. The speaker sees the tulips' redness as a source of danger because "it hurts [her]" and threatens her liberation. She feels it like "red lead sinkers round [her] neck." Its appearance has woken her from her numbness and brought her back to the painful reality that she is not ready to confront. It speaks to her "wound" and "upsets" her mind with its lively color. The vivacity of the tulips’ redness ruins her peacefulness. That redness is vigorously opposed to the whiteness of hospital room; it corresponds with life and raw consciousness that exist in stark contrast to the speaker’s fantasy of perpetual peace. Consequently, by denying the presence of the vibrant redness of the tulips, the speaker simply denies her current vitality and yearns for the ultimate freedom, which is death.

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