Fever 103
Pure? What does it mean?
The tongues of hell
Are dull, dull as the triple
Tongues of dull, fat Cerberus
Who wheezes at the gate. Incapable
Of licking clean
The aguey tendon, the sin, the sin.
The tinder cries.
The indelible smell
Of a snuffed candle!
Love, love, the low smokes roll
From me like Isadora’s scarves, I’m in a fright
One scarf will catch and anchor in the wheel,
Such yellow sullen smokes
Make their own element. They will not rise,
But trundle round the globe
Choking the aged and the meek,
The weak
Hothouse baby in its crib,
The ghastly orchid
Hanging its hanging garden in the air,
Devilish leopard!
Radiation turned it white
And killed it in an hour.
Greasing the bodies of adulterers
Like Hiroshima ash and eating in.
The sin. The sin.
Darling, all night
I have been flickering, off, on, off, on.
The sheets grow heavy as a lecher’s kiss.
Three days. Three nights.
Lemon water, chicken
Water, water make me retch.
I am too pure for you or anyone.
Your body
Hurts me as the world hurts God. I am a lantern——
My head a moon
Of Japanese paper, my gold beaten skin
Infinitely delicate and infinitely expensive.
Does not my heat astound you! And my light!
All by myself I am a huge camellia
Glowing and coming and going, flush on flush.
I think I am going up,
I think I may rise——
The beads of hot metal fly, and I love, I
Am a pure acetylene
Virgin
Attended by roses,
By kisses, by cherubim,
By whatever these pink things mean!
Not you, nor him
Nor him, nor him
(My selves dissolving, old whore petticoats)——
To Paradise.
Sylvia Plath, “Fever 103°” from The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath, edited by Ted Hughes. Copyright © 1966 and renewed 1994 by Ted Hughes. Reprinted with the permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
Source: Collected Poems (HarperCollins Publishers Inc, 1992)
Getting familiar with Plath after reading the Bell Jar, she makes me understand more about beginnings, of being born into a beginning almost...we get what we get, and why we get it and why some others get some others...well, we can only hope that it keeps going around again and the darkness that she felt can be recycled and cleanses and brought out again the opposite.
ReplyDeleteIn so many ways, this poem captures the Bell Jar, so many ways of death, but even once you are entering the kingdom of death, still more torture. If I had thought up a hell in my mind it would be being alone, a place devoid of beauty, cold maybe versus hot...sad instead of angry...hers always seems to be the worst.
This poem is almost as triply as "The Hollow Men."
ReplyDeleteWhat illness is this?
"My selves dissolving" sounds like dementia. Losing the sense of self and only the strongest memories remain. The narrator must have had strong religious ideas and was cynical. Is that my fate???? Haha