Fever 103° by Sylvia Plath
I randomly came across this poem while searching for something else. Bonus!
Fever 103°
By Sylvia Plath
Pure? What does it mean?
The tongues of hell
Are dull, dull as the triple
Tongues of dull, fat Cerberus
Who wheezes at the gate. Incapable
Of licking clean
The aguey tendon, the sin, the sin.
The tinder cries.
The indelible smell
Of a snuffed candle!
Love, love, the low smokes roll
From me like Isadora’s scarves, I’m in a fright
One scarf will catch and anchor in the wheel,
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 bred 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.
Greasing the bodies of adulterers
Like Hiroshima ash and eating in.
The sin. The sin.
Darling, 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.
I am too pure for you or anyone.
Your body
Hurts me as the world hurts God. I am a lantern—
My head a moon
Of Japanese paper, my gold beaten skin
Infinitely delicate and infinitely expensive.
Does not my heat astound you! And my light!
All by myself I am a huge camellia
Glowing and coming and going, flush on flush.
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
Attended by roses,
By kisses, by cherubim,
By whatever these pink things mean!
Not you, nor him
Nor him, nor him
(My selves dissolving, old whore petticoats)—
To Paradise.
I like the dark elements…however I am completely lost as to what it means. Do you have any thoughts? :)
emerson,
In general, I don’t try to figure out what Sylvia Plath’s poetry means (to myself, or more universally). I think any attempt might make my head explode. I’m drawn to her imagery and I like to think that her poems hold many secrets that I choose not to discover.
Warning. In keeping with PSSA (Poetic Safty Standards Association) guidlines, the following comment may cause heads to explode. Read at your own risk.
From some perspectives, this poem is certainly a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key.
To me, the key begins with the reference to Isadora. In this case, Isadora Duncan.
Isadora was a spirited muse who lived her life in the early 1900s. More known in Europe compared to her native America, she is often credited with founding modern dance. It was a time when a sea change in both art and society was at work. It was the time of Stravinsky and the near riot caused by his Rite of Spring. When Picaso shocked tradition, changing his own style from realistic art to cubism. When world history was changing with the impact and residuals of the first world war — back when it was called the Great War. Back before we numbered wars with nice, orderly hindsight. Isadora was bohimian before the word was coined, and was perhaps part of the minting.
How do we know that’s what Plath was thinking? Well, “Isadora’s scarves” is actually a double, unmistakable reference to Duncan’s life.
The first is taken from her dancing: dancing most famously done often in little more than scarves. She broke with constained and controlled ballet and started a primitivist style the emhasised raw emotion and improvisation. She shocked. She inspired. She changed art. Perhaps she was a bit mad, who knows, but it seems to me all that almost out of control creative energy is what Plath is referencing. Plath has touched the same fire.
And the second reference is taken from Isadora’s death. In 1927, age 50, dance career reduced, fortune expired, she was killed when her long scarf (hand painted, a gift from an artist) caught in the back, spoked wheel of the her car. She was thrown from the car, strangled, and all but decapitated. A dramatic end to a life that seemed to know only highs and lows, and few in-betweens.
Which brings us to Sylvia Plath. American poet. Famous for her book ‘The Bell Jar.’ A fequently emotionally troubled writer who took her own life at age 31. A year after writting this poem, as much as I can discover.
And so as I read her poem, I see it several ways: first, a specific tribute to Duncan and rejecting intellectual control in art in favour of free form emotion; second, a pure, gut-wretching rejection of the troubes Plath sees and feels in the world around her and in her personal world; and finally, the unintentional portrait of a creative mind trying to deal with too much dark emotion all at one time. An artist trying to deal with it in the one way she know how, channeling it into her art.
As a final touch, the poem itself is written in a style that rejects formalism. She probably smiled to herself with that touch. This poem would not have worked as a sonnet.
So if writting poetry is the art of pulling someone into your world and having them experience the your emotion as their own, I have to admit Plath has succeeded. I would not want to live this poem every day.