Speaker
Famously a confessional poet who mined her turbulent life for semi-autobiographical poetry, Sylvia Plath herself can be reasonably identified as this poem’s speaker. From archival letters, we know that Plath suffered a 103° fever the day before she wrote this poem, cementing our identification of the author as speaker.
Isadora Duncan
Isadora Duncan, often called “the mother of modern dance,” was a pioneering American dancer whose ghastly manner of death in 1927 is referenced in this poem. Isadora Duncan died when the long scarf she was wearing in a convertible became wrapped around the car’s axle. The scarf jerked her out of the car, breaking her neck and, according to some reports, nearly decapitating her.
Cerberus
Another allusion made by the speaker is to the three-headed dog guarding the gates to Hades, the underworld in Greek mythology. Cerberus is generally portrayed as monstrous and terrifying, but the speaker paints him with unexpectedly disparaging adjectives: “dull,” “fat,” “wheez[ing],” “incapable.” Rendered unhealthy and ineffectual, he is a watchdog adapted to the author’s specific hell: that of sickness, with its brutal capacity to be dumb and dull.
