Point of View

Throughout “Full Fathom Five,” Plath consistently uses a singular second-person perspective. Rather than employing her second-person pronouns to refer to a generalized or abstracted “you,” Plath is highly specific about the identity of “you” from the very start of her poem. Succinctly, in the very first line of the poem, Plath writes, “Old man, you surface seldom,” thereby pairing “you” with the “Old man.”

Yet rather than creating a high degree of intimacy between Plath and the “Old man,” Plath instead instills a sense of emotional distance into her poem. While second-person pronouns certainly do recur throughout the body of her poem, the focus on icy cold sensory detail and his unexpected emergences from the deep waters create an atmosphere of wariness and even hostility. With her detailed, descriptive language, Plath distances herself into an awestruck, mystified, and frightened faraway third-person observer, carefully noting the...