Purity and Sin
Early in the poem, the speaker’s world is replete with sin, rotten with death. It is a “dull,” “sullen,” “greas[y]” hell of ash and smoke and heat. In contrast with the “low smokes” of death that “will not rise,” the purity she reaches for and attains in the second half of the poem is light and ascendant. After the heaviness of suffering from her illness and the rank sinfulness that permeates her world, she ascends airily into paradise. Implicit in the arc of the poem is that in order to reach this transcendent state of purity, the speaker first has to suffer great pain. This comes in the form of the high fever which gripped the speaker for three days, until even “water [made] me retch.” Through that painful emptiness, she reaches a heavenly purity where her very “selves” are “dissolving.” This dissolution, coded as beautiful and pure, stands in contrast to the ghastly deaths by choking and irradiation in the first half of the poem.
Heaven and Hell
The rich visual language of the poem is unmoored from setting but steeped in two symbolic traditions: that of Hell and Heaven, and both of their fires. The first half of the poem smolders with the toxic flames of Hell: death is there in the “yellow sullen smokes” that “chok[e] the aged and the meek, / The weak / Hothouse baby in its crib.” In the first half of the poem, life is hellish because it is full of pain without relief. The second half of the poem is aflame with Heaven’s purifying fire: “Does not my heat astound you! And my / light!” Plath writes. With flying “beads of hot metal,” she ascends to Paradise, a “Virgin” attended by “cherubim.” The relief of stripping away her pain, her sin, is ecstatic. Religious imagery here is used to emphasize the depths of her pain and heighten the relief of its absence.
Sexual Transgressions
Adulterers and lechers pock this poem’s hellish landscape. Written just weeks after Sylvia Plath’s husband left her for the woman with whom he had cheated on her, this poem highlights sexual transgressions as a source of torment and destruction. When Plath writes, “I am too pure for you or anyone. / Your body / Hurts me as the world hurts God,” it marks the turn from hellish to heavenly imagery, and invokes a deviant “you” who may well be her sexually unfaithful husband. Rising towards heaven, now a “Virgin” whose “old whore petticoats” dissolve as she ascends, the speaker’s willful abandonment of her sexual and romantic history leads her toward a higher, painless state.
