"Lady Lazarus" by Sylvia Plath

"Lady Lazarus" by Sylvia Plath

I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it--

A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot

A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine
Jew linen.

Peel off the napkin
O my enemy.
Do I terrify?--

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.

Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me

And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.

What a million filaments.
The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see

Them unwrap me hand and foot--
The big strip tease.
Gentlemen, ladies

These are my hands
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.

The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut

As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I've a call.

It's easy enough to do it in a cell.
It's easy enough to do it and stay put.
It's the theatrical

Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:

'A miracle!'
That knocks me out.
There is a charge

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart--
It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

Ash, ash--
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there--

A cake of soap, 
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.



Plath, Sylvia. "Lady Lazarus." Poets.org. The Academy of American Poets, n.d. Web. 27 April 2014




During her rather short career as a working poet due to a long history of mental illness and instability, Sylvia Plath served as a pioneer for the Confessional movement that arose following the end of World War II. The movement emphasized personal connections to poetry through the usage of personal pronouns, revelations of love affairs and suicidal thoughts, and expressions of feeling. Above everything else, the poems from the Confessional movement exposed the anxieties and doubts of Americans living in the suburbs under a cloud of mass consumerism. 




Like most of her other work, "Lady Lazarus" exemplifies the tenets of the Confessional movement using death, violence, and suffering as themes for her work. Starting with death, it is clear that the central actor of the poem is not a clear mental state having committed "it" multiple times, presumably suicide attempts considering Plath's background. In her mind, she sees herself as a victim of the Holocaust, a recurring motif in Plath's work. Moreover, the speaker is obsessed with both literal and metaphorical death because she sees herself as a victim of circumstance. In conjunction with the theme of death, Plath makes the poem incredibly violent referencing Nazis and graphic details about the state of the speaker's body. This theme of violence helps the audience understand the speaker's obsession with death a little more understandable. Personally, I find the third primary theme of the poem to bit a little sick but the speaker's desire to suffer like Jews murdered during the Holocaust plays a major role in the poem.