Fire (Motif)
The word “fire” never occurs in the poem, and yet fires are present throughout, initially in the “tinder” and “snuffed candle” and “smoke” of the poem’s hellish landscape. Oppressive heat presses in on the speaker in the first several stanzas, from the smoke that chokes the weak, to the disturbing incubation of the “Hothouse baby in its crib,” to the deadly radiation which kills a “devilish leopard,” and consumes the “bodies of adulterers / Like Hiroshima ash.” Sin, suffering, and death in the first half of the poem are all aflame.
Halfway through, the poem reaches a turning point where the speaker’s meandering, hallucinogenic visions ground themselves in the heat of her fever, which flickers “off, on, off, on.” After that, the speaker is suddenly “too pure for you or anyone.” The heat of her feverish body purifies her, makes her beautiful: she is “a lantern,” emitting both “heat” and “light.” The second half of the poem is ornamented by fiery and flowery imagery as the speaker finds herself transcending the plane of suffering through a purifying heat. One fire torments her body, while the other fire liberates her from her body.
Light (Symbol)
In the Bible, light connotes knowledge and insight. In the hell of the speaker’s suffering, she is choked by the smoke of a “snuffed candle”; in the heavenly reprieve which follows, she is a “lantern,” emitting both “heat” and “light.” The arc of the poem is towards light and lightness. Her hell is associated with darkness and heaviness, while the heaven toward which she ascends is light in both senses: bright and weightless. She is a “pure acetylene / Virgin,” acetylene being a flammable gas that is lighter than air. Light in the poem is replete with symbolic meaning, as it is through light(ness) that she finds revelation and release.
Isadora’s scarves (Allegory)
In 1927, the famous dancer Isadora Duncan’s scarves tangled with the axle and wheels of her convertible, strangling and killing her. Plath deftly twists the allusion to these scarves in the poem by writing that “the low smokes roll / From me like Isadora’s scarves,” indicating that the deadly smokes which “trundle round the globe / Choking the aged and the meek” are coming from the speaker. The speaker’s metaphoric scarves are not accidentally murderous, but suicidal. When she writes, “I’m in a fright / One scarf will catch,” the fear is not of accidental death, but of killing herself. The drama here is one of self-directed fear and loathing: the speaker senses that the agent of her potential death is within herself, and it is herself she struggles against.
Fever (Motif)
Plath capitalizes upon the metaphoric resonances of feverishness in this poem to dramatize a purity reached through suffering. A fever is not an illness in itself, but a sign of the body struggling to fight off an illness. And yet the discomfort of a feverish body, chilled and sweating and restless, makes us feel as though we suffer the fever instead of the disease. The line “Incapable / Of licking clean / The aguey tendon, the sin, the sin,” where “aguey tendon” means “feverish muscles,” links the struggle to cleanse oneself of sin with the body’s attempt to cleanse itself of illness through fever. At first, the speaker suffers the fever itself, as if it were the problem. And then it becomes the solution, as the heat of her body purifies her: from her “flickering” fever she finds herself suddenly “too pure for you or anyone,” her body’s heat “astounding.” The drama of sin and purity, hell and heaven, is also the arc of illness into health, bridged by a fever.
Myth (Motif)
The poem begins with a mixed metaphor involving Christian Hell and Greek Hades, likening the “tongues of hell” to the triple tongues of the three-headed watchdog, Cerberus, who guards the gates of Hades. It ends with references to cherubim and Paradise, trappings of a Christian heaven, entangled with the imagery of a flying chariot (“I think I may rise—the beads of hot metal fly”) that evokes Helios, the ancient Greek personification of the sun who drove a chariot through the sky. Mixing mythologies—in a poem whose initializing question is “Pure? What does it mean?”—slyly suggests that the purity it seeks is not traditional. Take the line “I / Am a pure acetylene / Virgin,” for example. The mythos of the Virgin Mary is paired with “pure acetylene,” a flammable chemical compound used for fuel that is unstable in its pure state. In contrast with the staid, timeless purity of the Virgin Mary, the speaker’s purity is flammable, unstable, and lighter than air. The language of mythology summons a host of symbolic associations that the poem both embraces and contradicts in a creative, undeniably impure fashion.
