Lines 1-4 introduce the poem's central image—"The tulips"—before shifting to a description of the speaker's setting and mental state.
In line 1, the speaker describes "the tulips" as "too excitable" for their "winter" surroundings. Right away, it's clear that this is a personification; tulips can't literally be excitable (high-strung) in the way humans can. As the poem goes on, it becomes clear that this description is also metaphorical: the red color of the tulips is as vivid and attention-grabbing as high emotion. (It's possible, too, that the speaker is projecting her own emotions onto the tulips.)
This abrupt opening line leaves out a great deal of context: what tulips is the speaker looking at? Where did they come from? Where is "here"?
The following lines start to offer partial answers to these questions. The speaker is in "bed," surrounded by "white walls" and other "white" objects, "lying by myself quietly" and savoring the "peacefulness" of her environment. By the end of the stanza, which refers to "nurses" and "surgeons," it's clear that this environment is a hospital where the speaker is a patient.
Presumably, then, the tulips are a bouquet of get-well flowers sent by someone the speaker knows. (The poem never does reveal who sent them, so they're not defined by a particular relationship; rather, their significance lies in reminding the speaker that she has relationships and a life outside the hospital walls.)
Mentioning the tulips before explaining the setting might seem backwards, but it has at least two effects:
- First, it signals to the reader that the speaker's thoughts are somewhat meandering and may not always arrive in a "logical" order.
- Second, it places strong narrative emphasis on the tulips, which won't reappear until line 29 but which will become the main focal point, as well as the key symbol, of "Tulips."
Finally, these opening lines establish the poem's form. It's written in free verse and broken into fairly long, prose-like lines. Though the lines don't rhyme or stick to a steady meter, they're grouped into consistent seven-line stanzas (called septets), suggesting that the speaker is trying to arrange her wandering thoughts in some kind of order. Parallel phrasing ("how white [...] how quiet, how snowed-in," "these white walls, this bed, these hands"), repetition of important words ("white," "quiet"/"quietly," "lying"/"lies"), and strong alliteration and assonance (e.g., "learning"/"lying"/"light lies") give these lines about "peacefulness" a steady, calming sound.