Old man, you surface seldom
-- Speaker (Plath) (Line 1)

Importance: These lines open “Full Fathom Five.” They establish the the main subject of Plath’s poem, her “Old man,” as well as one of the primary perspectives of her verse, a specific second-person singular perspective, which uses the pronoun “you” to directly speak of the “Old man.” In addition, Plath opens her poem with a direct, apostrophizing invocation to the “Old man.” This invocation evokes a male history of poetics, dating as far back as Homer and his appeals to the muses, and establishes this storytelling tradition as the one that Plath is responding to. Concurrently, the invocation indicates the primary theme of paternity that Plath interrogates throughout her poem at both a personal level and the level of literary history.

Then you come in with the tide’s coming / When seas was cold, foam- // Capped: white hair, white beard, far-flung, / A dragnet, rising, falling...
-- Speaker (Plath) (Lines 2-6)