Pure? What does it mean?
With this initial question, the speaker embarks upon her quest for purity. The arc of the poem goes from a hellish present where purity is impossible—even incomprehensible—to a transcendent state of purity so perfect that the speaker abandons this painful world for the next one. Yet “purity” does not emerge as a stable idea in this poem. Rife with conflicting and overlapping metaphors, the poem's indulgence in Biblical imagery of sin and purity only complicates the purity of its own language. The speaker isn’t sure whether the “pink things” attending her ascension into Heaven are “roses,” “kisses,” or “cherubim.” Metaphors of the Christian Hell tangle with those of the Greek Hades. The speaker is a “lantern” and “a huge camellia” and a “pure acetylene / Virgin,” and to be all of these things at once is not pure, but decidedly mixed. Though the poem seems to grasp at paradise, the chimerical nature of the speaker’s purity hints at its unreality.
Darling, all night
I have been flickering, off, on, off, on
The sheets grow heavy as a lecher's kiss.
The speaker lies in bed awake, alone, and feverish. The “Darling” to whom she speaks is unidentified, but we know historically that this was one of her first weeks in bed alone, after the dissolution of her marriage to Ted Hughes. In a letter she wrote to her friend Clarissa Roche, she described her 103° fever as “flickering,” and here that language reappears in the poem she wrote the morning after her fever, describing how it flickered “off, on, off, on,” in degrees of pain and heat and wakefulness. The heaviness of the covers, compared to a “lecher’s kiss,” may be a jab at Hughes, whose sexual infidelity ended their marriage, and whose recent absence she no doubt keenly felt.
All by myself I am a huge camellia
Glowing and coming and going….
To be a camellia “all by myself” may be interpreted as a reference to the symbolic meaning of camellias: they represent the union between two people. It is considered a romantic flower because of how the flowers fall intact, with the base and the petals falling together without coming apart. “Glowing and coming and going” beautifully encapsulates life and death as a brief blooming. Being a camellia “all by herself,” Plath declares that she is sufficient in herself; she doesn’t need another to complete her.
