“Fever 103°” is a poem written by Sylvia Plath in the dark hours of the early morning on October 20, 1962, three months before her death. It was first published in the magazine Poetry in August 1963, and was among the poems Plath selected for publication in her poetry collection Ariel, which was published posthumously in 1965.
On October 19, 1962, Plath was “running a flickery 103° fever,” as she wrote in a letter to her friend Clarissa Roche. The letter revealed the dark turn her life had taken, after she had become sick and recently separated from her husband: “I am at present totally without access to friend or relative and have been stupidly ill, lost a lot of weight.” The morning after her fever, Plath sat down and wrote the first draft of this poem in the dark. She told Clarissa it felt like she was “writing in a train tunnel, or God’s intestine.” That October she wrote feverishly “from dawn to when the babes wake, a poem a day,” composing 26 poems in the month, most of which would end up in Ariel. Just eight days previous, she wrote perhaps her most famous poem, “Daddy.”
In “Fever 103°,” the speaker suffers from a hallucinogenic fever. Vivid, putrid sights and smells straight out of hell come one after another like the rolling waves of a fever. At first, the speaker feels estranged from purity, sick as a dog—like the “dull, fat Cerberus,” the watchdog of Hades—but as the poem continues, it lifts to a kind of fever pitch where the speaker finds herself purified. Living through hell, the speaker imagines what comes after as an otherworldly purity. She is “too pure for you or anyone,” discarding her old “selves” like “old whore petticoats” on the way to Paradise.
In a BBC interview, Plath stated: “This poem is about two kinds of fire—the fires of hell, which merely agonize, and the fires of heaven, which purify. During the poem, the first sort of fire suffers itself into the second.” It is also worth noting that Plath suffered from a manic-depressive disposition which she describes “as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative—whichever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it.” The juxtaposition of these two kinds of fires in “Fever 103°” can be seen as contiguous with the “two electric currents” Plath vacillated between, euphoric and desolate.
