Tulipomania

My first introduction to "Tulipomania" by Katrina Vandenberg was two years ago when author John Green referenced it in a YouTube video (see below). In the video, he quotes a section of the poem, and it was enough to draw me in and convince me to purchase Vandenberg's work. "Tulipomania" was one of my first experiences with recently published poetry and encouraged me in my poetic pursuits by revealing that the study of poetry can be more than struggling through 15th century sonnets.

The poem "Tulipomania" centers around a frenzy over tulip bulbs that occurred in the 1630s, in which Dutch speculators were known to pay more than a merchant's yearly salary for a mere bulb. A particular bulb, called the Viceroy, was especially appealing, but no one knew that they were infected by the tulip mosaic virus, which made them more beautiful but ultimately resulted in their extinction.

A Viceroy tulip as depicted in a 1637 Dutch catalog. 

"Tulipomania" is structured in tercets and begins with an introduction to the tulips' appearances, full of similes and metaphor to illustrate the imagery.

"The Dutch had never seen a flower 

with this intensity: the deep purple 

of Viceroys bewitching as black silk,

the scarlet of Gouda that rustled like lust.

They had never seen such vivid contrasts:

the golds that threaded through the petals' tapestry,"

The similes use of "bewitching" and "lust" really illustrate the appeal of the tulips and the idea that the frenzy for them truly was something close to mania.
The next lines use simile to bring to mind connotations of disease and suffering -

"the crimson that throbbed through cream like blood

seeping through clean linen..." 

Through this simile, one can instantly picture the white cloth being pressed against a wound to slow the bleeding.
Following this -

"...And if they called

a tulip like this "broken," broken was what  

they wanted..."

Those lines in particular are to me what the entire poem is about, and bring to mind "the hectic glow of consumption" that Thoreau described. As humans, we see something beautiful in disease, both in our fellow man and likewise in flowers such as tulips. We hold a notion that suffering makes something more beautiful, and somehow more worthy. The idea of wanting something that is broken extends to our desire for flowers and our desire for each other. How many people begin relationships and friendships with someone who is somehow "broken," because they want to be the one to fix them?
We find beauty in the destructive, and in the Viceroy bulbs and the tulip mosaic disease, that concept is displayed literally.

The poem continues -

"...They could not know the ones they craved

were brilliant from infection with a virus,

but must have seen these bulbs were weak and small

and did not breed. Today the mosaic virus

is gone, and tulips are no longer dear;

the blooms that fed this fever have long died out."

I love the use of the word "fever" here, as it holds the double meaning of both the frenzy for tulip bulbs and the disease that killed them.
My favorite lines of the poem follow -

"But aren't you sorry you will never see

a tulip that would make you offer all

you own for the layered, translucent promise

in its brown paper wrapper?"

We can see depictions of the Viceroy tulip from those who were alive to see it themselves, but we can never personally view a flower so diseased and yet so beautiful. There is something haunting and illuminating in thinking about an object that was once alive, but that never will be again, and that we can only experience through other people's words and creations.

Here's the video that introduced me to Katrina Vendenberg's work and the phenomenon of Tulipomania.

(In case you're wondering, Hank is his brother, who he makes videos back-and-forth with.)