I began to think vodka was my drink at last. It didn’t taste like anything, but it went straight down into my stomach like a sword swallowers’ sword and made me feel powerful and godlike.

The speaker describes alcohol not as a pleasure of taste but as an instrument—something that bypasses sensation and acts directly on the body and psyche. The simile of the sword swallower suggests both danger and performance: drinking becomes a controlled flirtation with harm, a spectacle of toughness. The resulting feeling of being “powerful and godlike” captures intoxication’s false transcendence, a chemically induced sovereignty that temporarily overrides vulnerability, fear, or self-doubt. In Plath’s work, such moments often carry an undertow of irony: the very immediacy and potency that make the drink feel like empowerment also hint at dependence and self-violation, as if the “sword” is turned inward.