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Lady Lazarus
'A sort of walking miracle, my skin / Bright as a Nazi lampshade, / My right foot / A paperweight, / My face a featureless, fine / Jew linen," (lines 4-6). Sylvia Plath's poem "Lady Lazarus" is pervaded by chilling imagery evoking Nazi concentration camps and the decay of human flesh. Yet the tone of "Lady Lazarus" is more sarcastic than sad, more angry than fearful. Plath's poem describes a third failed suicide attempt: the poem begins "I have done it again. / One year in every ten / I manage it," (lines 1-3). However, far from being glad that the doctors have rescued the poet from her demise, the narrator despises "Herr Doktor" for interfering in the "art" of dying, an "art" she performs "exceptionally well," (lines 44; 45). The narrator acknowledges her preoccupation with death, and admits freely her determination to persist in her suicide attempts: "I am only thirty. / And like the cat I have nine times to die," (lines 20-21). Although she failed on her third attempt, the narrator remains confident of her eventual victory. The narrator also views the doctor's interference in her dying as an egotistical act of arrogance. Comparing the doctor to a Nazi is a heavy analogy of the patriarchal and oppressive nature of the modern medical system. The narrator also suggests that in saving her, the doctor plays God just as Jesus did in the New Testament story of Lazarus. The tone of "Lady Lazarus" is sarcastic, ironic,...
For example, in line 4 the narrator describes herself as "A sort of walking miracle," and then states, "my skin / Bright as a Nazi lampshade," (line 5). The narrator does not seriously suggest that she is a "walking miracle" simply because her suicide attempt was arrested. In fact, in a later stanza, the narrator again evokes the word "miracle" to sarcastically suggest that what the doctors do is far from being miracle work. Also, to compare her skin to a "Nazi lampshade" is a curious poetic devise that is loaded with sarcasm and dark humor. Sarcastic imagery concordant with the analogy of Nazism also occurs in the following stanza, in which the narrator compares her face with "a featureless, fine / Jew linen," (lines 8-9). Later, the narrator's face is far from being featureless, as she describes her sardonic smile, her nose, and her "full set of teeth," (line 13). The narrator likens herself to the eerie image of a skull, even though she is not yet dead. By doing this, she also mocks the doctor's attempts to stop her from killing herself.
Other sarcasm-laden ironic imagery includes that of her performing a mummy strip tease: "The peanut-crunching crowd / Shoves in to see / Them unwrap me hand and foot / The big strip…
Sylvia Plath: The Use of Dramatic Monologue as Confessional Poetry Sylvia Plath presents an unusual paradox as a writer. On one hand, she is lauded by literary critics, particularly feminist critics, for her use of confessional poetry. Specifically, in poems such as "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus" Plath is assumed to be 'confessing' certain aspects of her personal life. Like the speaker of "Daddy," she was the daughter of a German father;
Sylvia Plath: A Brilliant but Tortured 20th Century American Poet One of America's best known twentieth century poets, Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) lived an artistically productive but tragic life, and committed suicide in 1963 while separated from her husband, the British poet Ted Hughes. Before her death at age 30, Sylvia Plath had suffered a bout of severe depression for several months, the likely result of her separation from Ted Hughes and
Ultimately, Lady Lazarus uses her status as a failed suicide as a source of power, not disempowerment. The haunting words of the end of the tale that she is a woman who eats men like air are meant to underline the fact that despite the fact that the doctors feel that they are the source of her coming to life again and again, there is a strength of spirit within
At twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back to you. I thought even the bones will do. (51-60) These lines allow us to see the poet dealing with her anger and the final thought is equally powerful when the poet tells her father, " Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through" (110). The anger, unlike her father, lives and that might be the most agonizing aspect of the poem. There is
All of this had been made possible due to the fact that with every man, or every ten men or every million people killed by the Nazis, the prisoner community only grew stronger and more indifferent to the thought of dying. A reason for why Plath chose to refer to the Holocaust in her poem would be that she considered the occurrence to be one of the worst acts of
Woman Loves her Father, Every Woman Loves a Fascist: The Politics and Poetics of Despair in Plath's "Daddy" Sylvia Plath is one of the most famous poets to emerge in the late 20th century. Partially due to the success of her autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, which details her partial recovery from suicidal depression, Plath's poetry has been frequently analyzed through the lens of her clinical mental problems. "Dying is An