Summary
“Pure? What does it mean?” The first half of the poem has no idea. Purity is unreachable. The first nine stanzas smolder with hellfire and lurch with fear. Cerberus, the three-headed dog who guards the gate to the underworld, appears first in a series of distressing images. The feverish speaker feels licked by the fiery tongues of hell, likened to the dull tongues of Cerberus, which cannot “lick[] clean” the sinful bodies passing through the gates of Hades. This convoluted metaphor establishes the futility of the speaker’s suffering: she’s burning, but it doesn’t cleanse or purify her. The fire of her fever, likened to hellfire, serves only to torment.
In stanza 4, the speaker first addresses her “love,” whom she goes on to refer to several times throughout the poem as “darling” and “you.” The elaborate and shifting metaphor which follows is that of smoke. The smell of a snuffed candle lingers, pervading the dark space of the poem. Smoke rolls from the speaker in tendrils likened to “Isadora’s scarves,” the scarves that inadvertently strangled the famous dancer Isadora Duncan. This "scarf of smoke" is the noose of death itself, and the speaker confesses to her lover that she’s afraid “one scarf will catch and anchor in the wheel,” as Isadora’s did, killing her. The smoke takes on a life of its own as the speaker characterizes it as a force of death all around the world, killing vulnerable people: “choking the aged and the meek, / The weak.”
The next several images of stanzas 7-9 roll disjointedly into each other, painting a tortured picture of vulnerability and violence. Death comes for the “weak / Hothouse baby in its crib,” and for the “ghastly orchid / Hanging its hanging garden in the air.” A “devilish” leopard turns white with radiation and dies; the bodies of adulterers are ravaged by death like “Hiroshima ash,” recalling the devastation wreaked by the atomic bomb. These images are phantasmagoric renderings of a cruel world—a fallen world. The arc of the first nine stanzas bridges the pain of the speaker’s illness and sinfulness with the sin and suffering that plague the world. At the close of the ninth stanza, the speaker laments, “The sin. The sin.”
Halfway through the poem, in stanza 10, the speaker addresses her “darling,” confessing that all night she’s been flickering “off, on, off, on” with fevered wakefulness. She describes that the sheets covering her body are as heavy and oppressive “as a lecher’s kiss.” For three days and nights, both water and food have made her throw up, and her body has grown weak and empty. Yet in stanza 12, this emptiness is first harnessed as a form of purity. The fever which has starved and tormented her becomes a purifying fire: “I am too pure for you or anyone,” the speaker pronounces. She is no longer a creature of hell, but a creature of heaven, likening how her lover’s body hurts her to how the world hurts God. She has found in herself a new power.
The speaker feels luminous and rarified, comparing herself to a Japanese paper lantern, “infinitely delicate and infinitely expensive,” which emits a gentle golden glow. She addresses her lover again, exclaiming that he should be astounded by the heat and the light she exudes. She compares herself to a blooming camellia flower. Then she begins to feel as though she’s ascending into heaven, light and free. She is suffused with a feeling of love with no particular object. The speaker is no longer herself, but “a pure acetylene Virgin,” untouched and untouchable, lighter than air. The world around her is as pink and precious as a rococo ceiling. Roses, kisses, and cherubim attend on her as though she were a heavenly being. As she ascends to Paradise, reborn, her old “selves dissolving” and likened to “old whore petticoats” to be thrown away, she condemns her lover and other men to an earthly hell. “Not you, nor him / Nor him, nor him… To Paradise,” she insists.
Analysis
This poem is visibly split along the middle. The first nine stanzas smolder with hellish horror, while stanzas 10-11 are grounded in the speaker’s feverish illness, and create a bridge to stanzas 12-18, which are rosy with heavenly imagery. The first nine stanzas refuse an answer to the poem’s opening question: “Pure? What does it mean?” The world painted in those 27 lines is so spoiled by suffering that purity is nowhere to be found. The thud-thud of repeated words—“dull, dull,” “the sin, the sin,” “love, love,” “hanging…hanging”—creates a lamenting echo, reinforced by the cries of the suffering which reverberate throughout the first half of the poem. Even the tinder of the fire “cries” as it catches flame.
The cries of the suffering are heard also through their stifling: these stanzas are rife with imagery of strangling and choking. The speaker is wrapped in smoke that threatens to choke her like the scarves that strangled the famous dancer Isadora Duncan. That same smoke travels the globe “choking the aged and the meek, / The weak.” The shape of an orchid flower is depicted like a noose, “hanging in its hanging garden in the air.” The speaker’s hellscape is one of both pained cries and their silencing. The special attention that this poem pays to voice and voicelessness should not be overlooked. If the speaker fears the smoke strangling her like Isadora’s scarves, she is fearing not only death but the loss of voice and breath. As we will see in Part 2, breath and air are significant parts of the poem’s rendering of heaven. Where hell is dark, hot, and breathless, heaven is light, hot, and airy. Heat is what bridges hell and heaven in this poem, just as the stanza describing the speaker’s fever bridges the first hellish stanzas and the final heavenly stanzas.
In the first two stanzas, Plath cleverly invokes the idiom of “licking flames” by comparing the “tongues of hell” to the tongues of Cerberus, who is incapable of “licking clean/The aguey tendon, the sin, the sin.” Understanding that the speaker’s fever is being conflated with hellfire, we see that she’s anguished that her fever isn’t a cleansing and purifying force. An underlying premise of the poem is that the speaker’s illness feels like punishment to her. While this is a troubling interpretation of illness, it is a useful conceit for a poem absorbed with fire’s potential to purify.
Fire is used to sterilize metal by killing microbial life; silver and gold are refined through being heated to high temperatures. But the human body cannot survive immersion in fire: the closest that the body gets is the heightened temperatures of fevers, which are indeed our immune systems’ attempts to cleanse our bodies of viral agents. The association between fires and fevers is an ancient one—another word for fever is “pyrexia,” from the Greek root “pur,” or fire. In her later years, Sylvia Plath studied the Bible, struggling with faith and its absence. In Numbers, the fourth Biblical book, there is a verse that reads: “Everything that can endure fire, you shall put through the fire, and it shall be clean; and it shall be purified with the water of purification. But all that cannot endure fire you shall put through water.” Baptism is ritual purification by water. But this poem’s speaker felt that she was enduring the fire, and so demanded that it should cleanse her—that she should at least be purified.
There is a subtle unity between form and content in stanzas 4-9. It begins with the plume of smoke emitted by a snuffed candle, and shifting versions of that smoke wind their way through the next five stanzas. The smoke is described as low and rolling, not rising up and dispersing, but winding its way through the world to smother those that breathe it in. This smothering force changes its shape with each stanza, but it rolls from one into another, filling the poem with its stench. It is death, and it wraps itself around anyone and everyone: the speaker, the aged and the meek, a weak baby, a dying flower, a leopard, adulterers. The “devilish leopard” and the “bodies of adulterers” who suffer hellish torment in stanzas 8-9 may be considered allusions to Dante’s Inferno, and are connected images through their shared symbolism in that text. The leopard represents lust in the Inferno, and adulterers burn in the second circle of hell in the Inferno, with those condemned by their lust.
The stranglehold of sin is everywhere: that is the world which these first nine stanzas depict. I am not the only one, the speaker seems to say; the whole world is sick. Plath’s use of enjambment, so that stanzas with wildly unrelated imagery are connected through continuing sentences, reinforces the sense that sin is a universal contagion, afflicting us all.
Taking stanzas 10-11, which describe the speaker’s fever, as the bridge between the poem’s “hell” section and “heaven” section, there is another factor that encourages the reading of her fever as a threshold. A 103° fever is the temperature at which people are urged to call the doctor; it marks the point at which “pyrexia,” a fever, may become hyperpyrexia, a dangerously high fever. Long-lasting high-grade fevers can cause short and long-term consequences to the body; immediate symptoms include hallucinations. If the speaker has been suffering hyperpyrexia for three days and nights, as stanza 11 indicates, this not only provides a 'realistic' explanation for the hallucinatory images of the rest of the poem, but it also positions her fever as a potential bridge between life and death.
Stanzas 10-11 are the poem’s only instance of realism extending beyond psychological truth. This is where “confessional poetry” is most closely tethered to autobiographical fact; the speaker’s narration of being bedridden with a “flickering” fever matches Sylvia Plath’s description of her “flickery” fever in an October 19, 1962 letter, written the day before this poem’s conception. The speaker confesses to her “darling” that for three days and nights she has been too sick to eat or drink. While the identity of this “darling” need not match any individual in Plath’s life, the pivot from affection to anger in stanzas 10-12 (from “darling” to “I am too pure for you….Your body hurts me”) evokes the recent dissolution of Plath’s relationship to Ted Hughes. Reading stanzas 10-11 as Plath informing Hughes how she’s suffering a fever alone in bed accounts for the rising anger of stanzas 12-18, which acerbically condemn him and everyone else.
This progression can be read along non-autobiographical lines as well. The lines, “I am too pure for you or anyone. / Your body / Hurts me as the world hurts God,” foreshadow the dissolution of her “selves” in the final stanza of the poem, in that the corporeal is a betrayal. As the physical world hurts God, her lover’s body hurts her body. If she is to transcend this pain, the body must be left behind. This poem doesn’t redeem the body; it is through her emptied body after three days of vomiting that she finds herself purified, and still her body and her identity end up “dissolving” en route to Paradise. Fire is an apt vehicle for the kind of purity this poem realizes, because it consumes. Embodying a stable or enduring purity is not an option. Plath’s purity is as volatile as the “pure acetylene” she claims to be: a gaseous compound that is unstable in its pure form.
In stanza 13, the speaker’s skin is referred to as “gold beaten.” We can understand this in reference to “goldbeating,” the act of hammering gold into thin sheets for use in gilding, which is the decorative process of applying a thin coating of gold to objects. Japanese paper lanterns (chochin lanterns) are not gilded with gold, though there are traditional bronze-gilt lanterns, and the Japanese practice of kintsugi (“golden joinery”) involves mending broken ceramics through painting the cracks with golden paste. In the last line of stanza 13, where “infinitely delicate” describes the character of Japanese paper lanterns, “infinitely expensive” better fits the image of being gilded in gold, as paper lanterns are not expensive. Plath’s mixed metaphor of the speaker as a Japanese paper lantern with “gold beaten skin” is best understood as an elaborate image of gentle and warm illumination.
This reading is furthered by stanza 14’s exclamation: “Does not my heat astound you! And my light!” In contrast to the darkness of the “snuffed candle” and smoke’s stranglehold on the first half of the poem, motifs of light and heat accompany the speaker’s feeling of liberation in the second half. As discussed in the Quotes section of this guide, the speaker’s assertion that “All by myself I am a huge camellia” calls up the symbolic association of camellias with unions between two people. Camellia flowers fall fully intact, while many other flowers first lose their petals; this is romanticized as lovers who remain together even in death. Described as “glowing and coming and going, flush on flush,” the camellia metaphor stands in for a whole lifespan of growing and maturing and dying. The speaker asserts here that she can live and die by herself; she doesn’t need a partner in it.
After this arc of life into death so briefly encapsulated by the blooming camellia, stanza 15 moves toward the afterlife, with the speaker commenting: “I think I am going up, / I think I may rise.” After this, “the beads of hot metal fly,” an abstract image of metal turned liquid, which can only occur at extremely high temperatures. The imagery of metal flying through the air is also evocative of a flying chariot, as driven by the god of the sun, Helios, in Greek mythology. Stanzas 15-16 are full of imagery alluding to chemical reactions. Along with metal liquefying, there is the imagery of the speaker herself turning gaseous: “I / Am a pure acetylene / Virgin.” Just as solid substances change directly into vapors through the chemical process whose technical name is 'sublimation,' so the speaker’s transformation into “pure acetylene” plays on the archaic meaning of the verb 'sublime': to elevate to a high degree of moral or spiritual purity.
Stanzas 17-18, which describe the speaker's ascendance “attended by roses, / By kisses, by cherubim, / By whatever these pink things mean!” have a playfulness that undercuts the supposed purity of this vision. Joyfully irreverent, “whatever these pink things mean!” reveals the speaker reveling in an aesthetic image of ascendance which isn’t solemn or sacrosanct. There is room for revenge as well: “Not you, nor him / Nor him, nor him… To Paradise” remonstrates not only her maligned lover but many other anonymous men, condemning all of them to hell. Perhaps it also condemns them to life, which this poem has portrayed as a living hell. Written a few short months before her suicide, one of the poem’s gravest resonances may be its foreshadowing of Plath’s own “selves dissolving,” while the father of her children is condemned to continued life. Yet it is also a worthwhile endeavor to separate her works of art from their personal and predictive power, as they merit consideration on their own terms.
One final eccentricity in this poem’s vision of purity is implicit in the speaker’s “selves dissolving, old whore petticoats” as she ascends to Paradise. The appeal of an afterlife is that it is a continuation, in some form, of the self; while the body might “dissolve,” the soul is supposed to continue. Yet it is not merely the speaker’s body but her very “selves” that dissolve at the close of the poem, thwarting the expected reading of Paradise as a place of continuance. It is a far more ambivalent ending than the euphoria of stanzas 13-17 lead us to anticipate. But the clues are there in earlier stanzas: the speaker’s purity is metamorphic, not enduring; she is in turns a lantern, a flower, a gas, a Virgin; these versions of herself are fragile and facetious. No wonder that these, along with all her previous “selves,” are prone to dissolve. If she is “too pure for you or anyone,” she is also too pure for herself. The transcendence she revels in is one of self-erasure. The spark of self-loathing seen earlier in the poem, when she fears the smoke of death that rolls from her like “Isadora’s scarves,” is the force that finally shapes her vision of heaven too.
