“Fever 103°” begins with its defining question: “Pure? What does it mean?” In the next several stanzas, the speaker suffers a hellish landscape devoid of purity. The poem is grounded not in one setting but in many sensations: texture, sound, smell, sight. Stanza after stanza, a rolling series of vivid images creates a compounding impression of anguish. Sickness and sinfulness are confused and conflated: the speaker’s fever is likened to hellfire which punishes the sinful. The first simile laments that even the many tongues of the three-headed watchdog of Hades can’t lick clean the speaker’s sick and sinful body. In this hellscape, the sound of kindling catching fire is likened to crying, and the speaker exclaims about how the smell of the smoke from a blown-out candle lingers on. The picture she paints is of a dark, hot world of protracted pain.
In the fourth stanza, the speaker first addresses her “Love,” introducing an absent other to whom she speaks throughout the poem. She confesses that the smoke is rolling from her “like Isadora’s scarves,” evoking the scarves which accidentally strangled and killed the famous dancer Isadora Duncan. The speaker is exuding death. She admits her fright that “one scarf will catch and anchor in the wheel”—that she will be the instrument of her own demise. But these strangling smokes of hers are not of her own creation: they are “their own element” which encircle the world, “choking the aged and the meek, / the weak…” The speaker is one of many who suffer “Isadora’s scarves,” so to speak. Here she connects her mortal pain to that of countless others.
The next three stanzas further broaden the scope from the internal realm of the speaker’s pain to a widespread affliction. With a series of disturbing images, from a ghastly hanging orchid to a leopard turned white by radiation, Plath paints a picture of a toxic, deadly world. She compares the consumption of the bodies of adulterers—by death or by sin, as the attribution is unclear—to how the radiation in Hiroshima devoured human bodies. “The sin. The sin,” the poem laments. Intermixing sufferings on an individual, interpersonal and collective scale, the first half of “Fever 103°” powerfully depicts life as a hellish morass, from which there is no escape.
The tenth stanza marks the beginning of a departure. “Darling,” the speaker confesses, “all night / I have been flickering, off, on, off, on,” her consciousness fluctuating with her fever. She compares the heaviness of the sheets over her body to “a lecher’s kiss.” For three days and three nights, she has been unable to keep down any food or water. Her body is weak and empty. Then, in the twelfth stanza, the revelation of this emptiness becomes suddenly rapturous: “I am too pure for you or anyone,” the speaker declares. She has been freed from the hellish cesspool of bodily suffering. And her “darling” is revealed as that lecherous heaviness: “Your body / Hurts me as the world hurts God.” The “you” who this poem repeatedly addresses is both beloved and repudiated, part of the suffering she’s seeking to abandon.
The second half of the poem is ecstatic with the speaker’s sudden potency. She compares herself to pure, delicate, luminous things: “I am a lantern— / My head a moon,” emitting both heat and light, and “I am a huge camellia,” growing and blooming. She feels herself ascending into the sky, “a pure acetylene / Virgin,” likening herself both to the purity of the Virgin Mary and to the lighter-than-air flammability of acetylene, a gaseous compound. Attended by roses, kisses, cherubim, and “pink things” which are precious and pure, the speaker ascends towards heaven. She feels her “selves dissolving” like “old whore petticoats” as she leaves behind the sins of her life. And she refuses the accompaniment of her lover or any other man, insisting that they be denied the purity of this transcendence: “Not you, nor him, / nor him, nor him…. To Paradise.”
