Plath's Fever 103 analysis
Sylvia Plath’s poem “Fever 103” is a figurative journey from Hell to a kind of Purgatory to a kind of Heaven. It is also, more secularly, an illustration of a spiritual cleansing or purification amidst a very high fever, which the woman speaking the poem is engulfed in. Plath begins the poem by asking, “Pure? What does it mean?” (Plath, 78), as if she had been having a conversation, and whoever she was speaking with had mentioned the word. The word is what evidently triggers the rest of the poem.The poem’s speaker first thinks of Hell, and a vision of Hell is described, including an allusion to the three-headed dog that guarded the gates of the underworld, Cerebus: “The tongues of hell / Are dull, dull as the triple / Tongues of dull, fat Cerebus / Who wheezes at the gate. Incapable / Of licking clean / The aguey tendon, the sin, the sin.” (78) “Sin” is repeated to reinforce the heaviness of it, and its perpetuality. “Love, love”, the speaker goes on, perhaps talking to whoever had first brought up the word “pure”, “The low smokes roll / From me like Isadora's scarves, I'm in a fright / One scarf will catch and anchor in the wheel.”
(78) The speaker is referencing the bizarre death of the dancer Isadora Duncan — famous for her originality and what many would call her sinful personal life — in which one of her long, ever-present scarves became entangled in the wheel of the car she had just entered, strangling her when the car drove off. The speaker fashions the scarf as a symbol of Duncan’s sinful indulgences, and as a parallel, the “low smokes” symbolize the speaker’s sins. The speaker is afraid the smokes, or one of her sins, will one day “anchor in [a] wheel”, or in other words, ...
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(78) The speaker is referencing the bizarre death of the dancer Isadora Duncan — famous for her originality and what many would call her sinful personal life — in which one of her long, ever-present scarves became entangled in the wheel of the car she had just entered, strangling her when the car drove off. The speaker fashions the scarf as a symbol of Duncan’s sinful indulgences, and as a parallel, the “low smokes” symbolize the speaker’s sins. The speaker is afraid the smokes, or one of her sins, will one day “anchor in [a] wheel”, or in other words, choke her.Continuing with the smoke imagery, Plath writes of the smoke as not sin now, but as a destructive force like Death, killing the vulnerable while “not rising”, but remaining close to the ground as if magnetized to Hell: “Such yellow sullen smokes / Make their own element. They will not rise, / But trundle round the globe / Choking the aged and the meek, / The weak / Hothouse baby in its crib, / The ghastly orchid / Hanging its hanging garden in the air, / Devilish leopard! / Radiation turned it white / And killed it in an hour.” (78) Then Plath connects the smoke with sin again, having the poem’s speaker imagine it, “Greasing the bodies of adulterers / Like Hiroshima ash and eating in. / The sin. The sin.” (79) “Sin” is repeated once again to make sure it is indelibly imprinted on the reader’s mind, perhaps to produce an unnerving effect, and to bring the focus back from death to sin. And “Hiroshima ash” (as well as “radiation” earlier), is a reference to the aftereffects of the atomic bomb that dropped on Japan and ended World War II. The speaker might be comparing the suffering sin inflicts on those involved to the suffering of those affected by the bomb in Hiroshima.Then, all of a sudden, the poem’s gaze shifts to the speaker herself, lying in bed and burning with fever, too sick to even drink anything. “Darling,” she says, effectively confirming that she has been speaking to a lover all along, “All night / I have been flickering, off, on, off, on. / The sheets grow heavy as a lecher's kiss. / Three days. Three nights. / Lemon water, chicken / Water, water make me retch.” (79) She depicts the sheets as heavy as a “lecher’s kiss” to again call the sinful to mind, and the repetition this time contributes to the delirious feeling of the fever.The speaker continues: “I am too pure for you or anyone. / Your body / Hurts me as the world hurts God.” (79) Since she directly transitions from describing her illness to expressing her opinion that she is pure beyond the purity of anyone else, it can be gathered that to her, her illness directly corresponds with the purity she is now feeling. And how pure is she? She compares her purity to that most pure concept on earth, God, declaring that her lover’s body, her lover’s earthly sins, “hurt her” as the world, sin’s birthplace and rampant playground, “hurts God”.“I am a lantern ⎯—”, the speaker says, the dash indicating the explanation of this statement to follow: “My head a moon / Of Japanese paper, my gold beaten skin / Infinitely delicate and infinitely expensive.” (79) In other words, the poem’s speaker is infinitely fragile and precious, but not in a vulnerable way like the “hothouse baby” and the “aged and the meek”, but in a way that makes her invaluable. A price cannot be put on her — the narrow indicators of worth we have in this world cannot apply to a being as high above others as she is.“Does not my heat astound you”, the speaker asks, “And my light. / All by myself I am a huge camellia.” (79) She portrays the effects of the heat of the fever on her to the pure beauty of the warm-coloured camellia flower. Associating the transcendent elation she feels with weightlessness, and rendering imagery of the purification of metals (metals glow hot when purified, and acetylene is the gas used in the process), she proclaims herself a virgin: “I think I am going up, / I think I may rise ⎯—/ The beads of hot metal fly, and I, love, I / Am a pure acetylene / Virgin” (79). “Virgin” is secluded into its own line to impose the loftiness and the all-encompassing importance of the thought. She sees her new virginal self as “attended by” flowers, angels, and not lustful caresses, but, significantly, only kisses — examples of pure beauty: “Roses, / By kisses, by cherubim, / By whatever these pink things mean.” (79-80) She rejects the hurtful bodies of men that contrast these pure examples of beauty by further clarifying that she is attended by, “Not you, nor him. / Not him, nor him” (80), nor any man on earth.Finally, at the end of the poem, Plath’s character experiences a vision of her shedding her worldly identity and her past sins, which used to dress her like scarves or “petticoats” dress a woman, once and for all. She reaches Heaven, or a place like Heaven, as a result: “(My selves dissolving, old whore petticoats) ⎯— / To Paradise.” (80)
