Near the beginning of “Full Fathom Five” Plath reveals that her poem is set in the sea – “you [Old man] come in with the tide’s coming / When seas wash cold, foam-” (2-3). Throughout her poem, Plath depicts an ambiguous relationship between the old man and the deep seas from which he originates, in which his body melds into and becomes inextricable from the features of the sea. For example, his “white hair, white beard, far flung,” are “A dragnet, rising, falling, as waves / Crest and trough” (3-6). In this way, the “cold” of the environment additionally takes on the latent, monstrous, and icy hostility of the old man that is underscored throughout the body of Plath’s poem and becomes differentiated from a traditional association with water as life-giving and maternally nurturing. Rather, Plath draws more attention to water’s latent destructive abilities and how the...