Fever 103 Literary Elements

The poem is written from the first-person perspective of a fictionalized version of the author, Sylvia Plath. Taking inspiration from her immediate life experiences—Plath suffered a 103° fever the day before writing “Fever 103°”—the speaker is undoubtedly related (and yet should not be considered identical) to the author herself.

This poem is made up of eighteen three-line stanzas (tercets). It does not have a regular rhyme scheme, but utilizes rhyme, repetition, alliteration and assonance irregularly throughout.

Metaphors:

“I am a lantern.”
“My head a moon / Of Japanese paper”
“I am a huge camellia”
“I / Am a pure acetylene / Virgin”
“My selves dissolving, old whore petticoats”

Similes:

“The tongues of hell / Are dull, dull as the triple / Tongues of dull, fat Cerberus”
“the low smokes roll / From me like Isadora’s scarves”
“Greasing the bodies of adulterers / Like Hiroshima ash”
“The sheets grow heavy as a lecher’s kiss”
“Your body / Hurts me as the world hurts God”

“the sin, the sin. / The tinder cries.”
“Love, love, the low smokes roll”
“Hanging in its hanging garden in the air”
“Glowing and coming and going, flush on flush”
“petticoats / To Paradise.”

An instance of irony in this poem is the depiction of the three-headed watchdog of Hades, Cerberus, as weak, subverting the reader’s expectations. Usually Cerberus is portrayed as a formidable and monstrous figure.

Confessional poetry

The poem is rich with visual language, but its only instance of being grounded in a tangible setting is halfway through the poem, in the speaker’s bed, when she suffers all night from her flickering fever and the sheets grow heavy. Otherwise the poem is an amorphous, shifting landscape of hellish and heavenly imagery, with new vivid images appearing in every stanza, only to vanish with the next.

The tone shifts between the first and second halves of the poem. At first, the speaker is anguished, frightened, irate and condemnatory. In the second half of the poem, she is exultant, flush with feeling and anticipation. One of the poem’s through-lines is the speaker’s tone of censure. From the early repetition of “the sin, the sin,” to the late repetition of “Not you, nor him, / Not him, nor him… To Paradise,” the speaker is consistently condemnatory of others, though she moves from despairing anguish into exhilarated pleasure.

The protagonist is the speaker. Her antagonist is manifold: herself (for being sick/sinful/suicidal), the horrors of the world (i.e. “Hiroshima ash”), the illness she’s suffering, the sexual transgressions of herself and others, the lover who has hurt her (“as the world hurts God”), and death itself.

The speaker is struggling towards a kind of purity that she fears she cannot grasp, and to which the horrors of the world and the behavior of herself and others seem violently opposed.

The climax of the poem is in its final stanzas, when the speaker finds herself ascending towards Paradise, her “selves dissolving.”

The speaker first foreshadows her ascent into heaven by declaring: “I am too pure for you or anyone. / Your body / Hurts me as the world hurts God.” She directly foreshadows her ascent with the lines, “I think I am going up, / I think I may rise.”

The speaker understates the power of Cerberus, who is generally understood to be the powerful watchdog of the underworld in Greek mythology, portraying him as dull, fat, wheezing, and “Incapable / Of licking clean / The aguey tendon.”

Plath alludes to Greek mythology in this poem when she writes about Cerberus, the many-headed dog who guards the gates of Hades. Her Biblical allusions include hell, Paradise, how “the world hurts God,” the “Virgin [Mary]”, and cherubim. She also alludes to the atomic bombs dropped by the US on Japan in WWII with references to deadly radiation and “Hiroshima ash.” The line “My head a moon / Of Japanese paper” is an allusion to traditional Japanese chochin lanterns made of translucent washi paper.

Hell is described as having tongues. Deadly smokes, which “trundle round the globe / Choking the aged and the meek,” are ascribed a murderous agency. Radiation is described as “eating” people’s bodies.

The speaker uses hyperbole when she claims: “I am too pure for you or anyone. / Your body / Hurts me as the world hurts God.”