Fever 103 Essay Questions

What are some of the effects of the frequent parallelism and doubling in this poem?

(For example: “the sin, the sin,” “off, on, off, on,” “Three days. Three nights,” “Lemon water, chicken / Water,” “Infinitely delicate and infinitely expensive,” “flush on flush,” “I think I am going up, / I think I may rise,” “Not you, nor him.”)

These doubles and repetitions have a pulsing or drumming quality like a heartbeat or an echo. Many life processes have this kind of rhythm: step by step, one after another. This poem is vividly alive, and the 'thud, thud' of these doubled words registers as a bodily rhythm, like the speaker's fluctuating fever. 'Epizeuxis' is the term for the repetition of a word or phrase in immediate succession for emphasis; in this poem, this re-emphasis increases the emotional intensity of what is being said.

There is also the hell-heaven, life-death dualism throughout this poem, where we find the central drama of the narrative. That tension may be heightened by the recurring parallelism throughout the poem. All of these pairs and doubles resonate with the greater dialectic conflict between two kinds of fire: the torturous fire of hell and the purifying fire of heaven.

Explain the relationship between illness and sin in this poem.

Early on, the speaker’s “aguey tendon” or “feverish muscles” are conflated with “the sin” so foul that even the tongues of Cerberus, watchdog of the underworld, can’t lick it clean. Sin is something that the speaker suffers at the same time she suffers her illness. The poem draws a parallel between what fever is to sickness and what fire is to sin. Just as a fever is the sign of a body’s internal battle against sickness, the speaker hopes that its heat might also cleanse her of sin. The purifying fire of heaven is portrayed as an effective fever—a cleansing heat—while the fires of hell only serve to torment the sinful. The question of illness as punishment is interesting here, as sickness is hardly a moral failing, in the way that “sin” is posited to be. The fact that the speaker suffers her illness as if it were a sin is no doubt related to the fact that her transcendence at the end of the poem involves leaving her body behind. There is no reconciliation with her body; after it becomes “a lantern,” suffused with heat and light, and then a “camellia,” and then a “Virgin,” the speaker experiences her “selves dissolving.” Being tethered to her sick body is tantamount to torture, and the relief from her physical ailments isn’t found in healing, but in abandonment of life. Though the ending of the poem is beautiful in its ecstasy, the problem of illness and sinfulness—that is, of a misdirected view of sickness as punishment—goes unresolved.