Lady Lazarus Questions and Answers Pdf

Lady Lazarus Questions and Answers Pdf 2,5,10,15

MARKS 10/15

1 .[Q. How are the themes of war and religion treated in the poem “Lady Lazarus”?

Or, Q. What is the theme of “Lady Lazarus”? theme of death? Or, Q. How does the work “Lady Lazarus” by Sylvia Plath use the

Or, Q. How does the work “Lady Lazarus” by Sylvia Plath use the theme of identity?]

‘Lady Lazarus’ is one of a group of poems that Sylvia Plath composed in an astonishing burst of creativity in the autumn of 1962. That summer she and her husband Ted Hughes had separated after seven years of marriage. Plath found herself alone with two very young children in Court Green, the old thatched house in the village of North Tawton, Devon, which she and Hughes had purchased in August of 1961. Hughes was mainly in London, where he had embarked on an affair with Assia Wevill.

Many of the most famous poems eventually published in Ariel (1965) were written in Court Green in the wake of these disastrous events, although the only time Plath could find to write was between a.m. and 8 a.m. each morning, before her children awoke. During the extraordinarily productive last week of October (in which she turned 30) she composed 11 poems, including the first drafts of ‘Lady Lazarus’. These poems, like her letters from this period, record how her moods swung from elation to despair, from extreme rage to excited belief in her ability to make a new life’, as she put it in a moment of optimism when writing to her mother on 16 October: ‘I am a genius of a writer; I have it in me. I am writing the best poems of my life. They will make my name.

This poem was written by Sylvia Plath, a great American poet and short story writer. ‘Lady Lazarus’ is a bitter dramatic monologue, famous for the themes of death and oppression. It was published in 1965, two years after her death by suicide. The poem gives hints to multiple suicide attempts of the tormented speaker. It also highlights the role of power and oppression in one’s life. The poem also expresses the ideas of not giving up and resurrection.

 

Throughout “Lady Lazarus,” the speaker uses extended metaphors of death and resurrection to express her own personal suffering. The speaker compares herself to Lazarus (a biblical reference to a man Jesus raised from the dead), telling the reader that she has died multiple times, and is, in fact, dead when the poem begins. However, through external forces, the speaker is brought back to life time and time

again. For Lazarus, his resurrection was a joyous event, and one might assume that all such resurrections would be happy. But the speaker of the poem subverts that expectation-she wants to die. And so the efforts of those who want to save her whether loved ones, or doctors, or whoever else-feel to the speaker like selfish, controlling acts committed against her wishes. Obviously, the speaker is not actual dead, but uses this metaphor to demonstrate how unbearable life is and, in turn, explain (and perhaps justify) her suicide attempts. Thus, the reader can interpret the poem as the musings of a suicidal mind, with death being alternately presented as freedom, escape from suffering, and the achievement of a sort of peace.

Throughout the poem, the speaker often contrasts life and death by using imagery that subverts the reader’s expectations. Note how the speaker describes life through disturbing images, such as comparing her skin to a “Nazi lampshade,” or describing her resurrection as “…flesh / the grave cave ate will be / at home on me.” This imagery is surprisingly applied to the speaker’s living body after it is resurrected. The speaker describes her experience of living as a kind of torture, almost as a kind of death-when she is brought back to life, her skin is like the dead skin of someone killed in the Holocaust, it is the skin of a dead woman forced back onto her living self. Thus, the speaker demonstrates how living, for her, is what death feels like for most people.

In contrast, the speaker describes death as a kind of calmness. For instance, when the speaker describes her second suicide attempt, the imagery evokes the peacefulness of the sea: the speaker tells the reader she “rocked shut,” alluding to the rhythmic, calming waves of the ocean, while the “worms” or maggots that invade a decaying corpse are depicted as “pearls.” The speaker also transforms into a “seashell,” shedding her skin to become a creature with a hard, outer shell, implying that her death offers blissful solitude and protection. For the speaker, skin, which falls away in death, is a symbol that the speaker is still alive. When she is resurrected against her will, the “flesh the grave cave ate” reappears on her. The speaker’s disdain for her skin seems to stem in part from the fact that the skin both displays and is the receptacle of the pain and suffering of life. The speaker at one point mentions others “eyeing .. my scars,” capturing both how skin is scarred by trauma, but also how skin displays that trauma for the world to see. In this way, the speaker’s skin subjects her to what she believes is an intolerable invasion of privacy. Death offers protection from that invasion.

When the speaker begins the poem, she reveals that she is currently dead-it can be assumed that she has tried to kill herself. She tells the reader she will be reborn as the woman she was. However, by the end of the poem, the speaker has transformed into a phoenix: “Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air.” Although this is seemingly a moment of empowerment for the speaker, this turn also conveys the hopelessness the speaker feels about her situation. The phoenix, a mythological creature, is known for its regenerative abilities. Thus, like the speaker,

way, the phoenix dies and is reborn. However, because the speaker has transformed into a phoenix at the end of the poem, this could signify that the speaker is stuck in a cycle of dying and being reborn that she can neither escape nor control. In this the speaker expresses the intolerability of her life-though, logically, the reader understands that the speaker is not truly immortal, the speaker demonstrates that her life is so insufferable that it feels as though her life will continue indefinitely, through the exhausting patterns of suicide and being saved and brought back to a life she does not want. This pattern, in turn, also explains why death is so desirable for the speaker: because she feels as though she cannot die, and must suffer forever, death is the only solution to end her suffering.

 

“Lady Lazarus,” is told from the perspective of a woman in a male-dominated society, and the speaker directly blames her suffering on the men whom she sees as oppressing her. The poem strongly suggests that the men mentioned are the ones-whether loved ones or doctors-who keep bringing the speaker back to life, suggesting how little autonomy women can ever hope to have in a patriarchal world. The poem’s metaphors of death and resurrection, then, come to illustrate how society seeks to dominate women’s lives and bodies. The implication is that one of the reasons that the speaker wants to die is because, ironically, it’s the only way to exercise some semblance of control over her own life-which then makes the fact that she can’t die all the more agonizing. Most often, the speaker’s oppression takes the form of objectification; society treats the speaker like an object whose purpose is to please others, rather than a complete human being. The speaker even goes so far as to compare herself to a Jewish person in Nazi-occupied Germany. She calls her skin a “Nazi lampshade,” her face a “Jew linen.” The former is a reference to an urban legend that Nazis made lampshades from the skin of Jewish people murdered in the Holocaust, while this linen refers to the cloth used to wrap the biblical Lazarus in his tomb. Notice also that these are both domestic items-and as such are associated with typical conceptions of femininity. Although invoking the Holocaust is definitely macabre and controversial, this comparison is meant to indicate the extent of the oppression the speaker feels, the degree to which the speaker has come to feel she is seen as a thing rather than as a person.

Later, while addressing her “enemies,” the speaker declares: “I am your valuable / The pure gold baby.” This metaphor not only reduces the speaker to someone else’s “valuable” item, like gold, but also infantilizes her by making this valuable object a “baby.” The fact that the speaker’s body is so often seemingly put on display for others further suggests how women’s bodies are never really their own, but instead used for the benefit/entertainment of other people. The speaker describes her suffering as being a spectacle for the “peanut crunching crowd,” which is at once a condemnation of the macabre interest people take in others’ pain and more specifically a commentary on how women’s pain is particularly commodified; note the sexualized language likening the unraveling of the cloth covering her corpse to a “strip tease.” Altogether, It’s clear the speaker doesn’t feel like she really has much say regarding her own life-and, in her mind, the culprit is the patriarchy.

Throughout the poem, the female speaker expresses particular tension towards several men. The speaker frequently uses apostrophe, directly addressing various figures: God, Lucifer, Doktor (German for “doctor”), and a more general Enemy. She calls them all “Herr,” which is German for “sir,” indicating that they are all men (and It’s also worth noting that Plath’s father was of German descent). These men all represent the different kinds of male authority figures in the speaker’s life-religious figures, doctors or psychologists, her father-who all work to control her. But the fact that the men referenced span from the prototypically good (God) all the way to the prototypical evil (Lucifer) suggests that these men can also be seen as more generally representing all men, or the entire male-dominated society in which she lives. Ironically, the speaker’s wish to die might then be interpreted as a desire to escape this world and its oppression-that is, perhaps, to the speaker, death represents a sort of freedom or reclamation of control over her own life and body. And yet, when she attempts to commit suicide, the speaker keeps being brought back to life! As such, the speaker warns that, when she returns from death, she will “eat men like air.” The speaker intends to destroy the men who have forced her to stay alive, and thus will finally be able to die as she wants. The speaker must consume men-and perhaps with them, their power over her-in order to finally do what she wants. Despite the tangible and almost frightening rage found in this revenge fantasy that ends the poem, though, it never quite pushes past being just a revenge fantasy, and thus seems ultimately not to promise an actual revolution but instead a condemnation of the impossibility of women’s liberation in a patriarchal world.

 

The speaker sardonically declares that “dying is an art, like everything else,” and repeatedly presents her suffering as a performance for an audience that is eager to watch the show. To put it bluntly: the poem is deeply critical of society’s twisted fascination with others’ suffering. The speaker describes her death and resurrection as being “theatrical,” and describes how “the peanut-crunching crowd”-you’d probably say “popcorn munching” today-push and shove in order to get a glimpse of Lady Lazarus, wrapped like a mummy in death, being resurrected. “The big strip tease,” the speaker ironically calls this show, suggesting that people view pain and suffering in much the same way they do sexual gratification: it’s all just fodder for their amusement.

The speaker even charges the audience for access to her: “There is a charge // For the eyeing of my scars” and “For the hearing of my heart” and even larger charges “for a word or a touch / Or a bit of blood / Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.” Not only are people able to watch the speaker suffer, but they are also able to actively participate in her suffering. People’s fascination with others’ pain, and lack

, seemingly know no bounds. At the same time, the speaker herself does seem to find some sense of empowerment from this spectacle, complicating the notion of it as purely exploitative or degrading. The speaker clearly feels oppressed by a society that objectifies her, and, in a way, decides to use that objectification to her advantage by charging for access to her pain. The speaker, in the lines immediately following, addresses her enemies: “So, so Herr Doktor. / So, Herr Enemy. // I am your opus, / I am your valuable.” The use of the word “opus” here implies that the speaker’s “work” or “art” of death and resurrection is not her work, per se, but rather is the artistic work of her enemies. This makes sense: all the speaker wants to do is die. The spectacle is created when she is continually forced to recover, to be resurrected, such that society can then look at and gossip about why she wanted to kill herself. The speaker suggests that the performance is being forced on her, that she is being forced to star in it.

The performance could also be seen as a metaphor that represents the complicated dynamic between the artist and their art. The speaker describes the repetitiveness of the performance exhausting, telling the reader that it’s easy enough to die by herself, but it’s the “theatrical comeback” to the “same place, the same face, the same brute / Amused shout” that truly “knocks her out.” Although the speaker’s performance is both authentic to her experience, and a way in which she can derive a sense of empowerment from her suffering, she is also wearied by having to repeat her suffering over and over. This could reflect the struggle many artists have when they represent their suffering in their work, and come to believe that, perhaps, the performance of suffering is what makes their work popular or valuable to others, not what they have to say about it.

The basic theme of Lady Lazarus is the regeneration of identity through the cycle of life and death. With this resurrection or rebirth comes new power, specifically that of the female (the speaker) now in a position to usurp the male. Sub-themes include personal and collective suffering, family influences and history and a woman’s place in a largely male dominated world.

2. [Q. What is “Lady Lazarus” by Sylvia Plath about? Justify the title. Or, Q. What does the title suggest in the poem ‘Lady Lazarus? Discuss illustratively.]

The title ‘Lady Lazarus’ refers to the New Testament account of Jesus’s resurrection of Lazarus from the dead. Plath’s inspiration for this may have been the lines in T S Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ in which the dithering hero imagines himself as ‘Lazarus, come from the dead, / Come back to tell you all.

Plath’s ‘Lady Lazarus’ also, however, explicitly refers to her own biographical

history. In the summer of 1953 she had taken an overdose of sleeping pills and hidden in the crawl space beneath the downstairs bedroom in her family home in Wellesley, Massachusetts, where she was eventually discovered by her brother Warren and her mother Aurelia. It is to this suicide attempt, as well as to a swimming accident that nearly cut short her life when she was ten, that she refers midway through the poem: “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.”

The poem anticipates yet another dicing with death, ‘Number Three’, from which, she predicts, she will again emerge like the phoenix from the ashes, though this time as a vampiric, female avenger: “Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air.” In fact her next suicide attempt, in the early hours of 11 February 1963, would succeed.

From the title, with its reference to the biblical Lazarus, raised from the dead by Christ, to the final stanza where the speaker, having been burnt to ash, rises like a phoenix, the emphasis is on regeneration – new form, miraculous transformation – the artist, the artistic work, living on.

Sylvia Plath titles the poem ‘Lady Lazarus’ to let her readers know that there will be references to death. Lazarus, the well known bible character who was brought back to life after three days in the tomb, will set the tone for the rest of Plath’s poem. Since we know that Lazarus was brought to life again, we might assume that this poem will be one of victory over death, just as the biblical story of Lazarus. We soon learn, however, that Plath intends to identify with the Lazarus decaying in the tomb rather than the Lazarus who had been brought back to life.

This poem was written by Sylvia Plath, a great American poet and short story writer. ‘Lady Lazarus’ is a bitter dramatic monologue, famous for the themes of death and oppression. It was published in 1965, two years after her death by suicide. The poem gives hints to multiple suicide attempts of the tormented speaker. It also highlights the role of power and oppression in one’s life. The poem also expresses the ideas of not giving up and resurrection.

The title of this poem refers to the biblical account of Jesus’s resurrection of Lazarus. In the poem, the speaker describes a series of attempted suicides: “I have done it again. | One year in every ten | I manage it”. Closely knitted to Plath’s own biography and the chronology of her own suicide attempts, the poem goes through each attempt: “The first time it happened I was ten”, relating to a swimming accident Plath had aged ten; “The second time I meant | To last it out and not come back at all”, nodding to a 1953 overdose with sleeping pills; and the closing lines, “Out of the ash | I rise with my red hair | And I eat men like air”, arguably pointing to her impending suicide in 1963.

In the poem, this act of suicide is intricately tied to a sort of grotesque and

objectified womanhood. She describes the return from the brink as “The big strip tease” of the “same, identical woman”, a “Comeback in broad day | To the same place, the same face, the same brute”, such that “I am your valuable, | The pure gold baby”. The speaker becomes an object, picked at for value by “Herr Doktor[…] Herr enemy”. “Herr Doktor” ties in with a horrifying strain of Holocaust imagery that runs through the poem. The speaker draws parallels between herself and the persecuted Jewish people, aligning herself with something scoured for goods, searching for “A cake of soap, | A wedding ring, | A gold filling”. Similarly, “Bright as a Nazi lampshade” points towards how the Nazis were rumoured to use Jewish skin for lampshades. Yet, unlike the Jewish people massacred by the Nazis, in this poem it is from this masochistic strain of mortifying imagery that the vampiric woman who “eat[s] men like air” gains her strength.

Though it is slightly autobiographical, the poem must be interpreted symbolically and psychologically without limiting it to the poet’s life experience alone. The extremity of anger in this poem is not justifiable as something possible with a normal person in real life. Besides, it is essential to understand from the psychoanalytic point of view, that the poem does not literally express reality alone: it is the relieving anger and frustration, and an alternative outlet of the neurotic energy in the form of poetic expression. Furthermore, it is necessary to understand the anger as being directed against the general forces of inhumanity, violence and destruction only symbolized by the males in the poem. By a process of association and surrealism, the protest moves from common males to Hitler, his experimenting doctor, the scavengers of gold on dead Jews, the dentists who had a turn before the corpses were disposed of for leather, soap, nightshades and fertilizer. The individual is associatively linked to inhumanity and oppression. Though the persona intended to die, just yielding to death will not annihilate her. She completes the poem with a final comeback.

The poem is technically a dramatic monologue. The title ironically identifies a female Lazarus; whereas the original Lazarus was male, the present speaker is identifying herself with Lazarus different in sex, behavior, and everything. The persona is a figure who wants to subvert all that she can of the tradition that attempts to bring you back and torture, rather than let you choose death. This female figure also represents the oppressed modern woman conscious of the fact that the male society will bring her back to life, because it needs to satisfy itself by oppressing the woman.

The title “Lady Lazarus” has a great deal of significance to the poem itself and has vast hidden meaning. Plath uses a biblical allusion by connecting her feminist creation of “Lady Lazarus” with Lazarus of Bethany, who was featured in the book of John. Plath modified Lazarus’s incident with death to correlate with her life struggles. In John 11:4, the Bible reads, “The sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that son of God, might be glorified thereby.” Though Lazarus died, Jesus was able to bring him back from the dead, however out of Jesus’s desire to advertise his

own power, rather than the kindness of his heart. Thus, Plath relates this to her own life, in which “Herr Doktor” has the talent to bring back from death and states of mental and physical instability. Plath tries to tell the reader that “Herr Doktor” interfered with her art of poetry, thus, causing her to suffer

3. Q. Why does Sylvia Plath use tercets in “Lady Lazarus”? Or, Q. Describe the energetic structure of the poem “Lady Lazarus.”]

Sylvia Plath must have known that by using such sensitive language she would shock and offend, just as she did in her poem Daddy, which focuses mainly on her father Otto. In the poem he is portrayed as a Nazi, yet in real life there is no evidence to suggest this. So the poet Plath is creating a poetic persona, a fictional character. The same goes for Lady Lazarus. This is not a straight autobiographical confessional poem at all but a created drama, a set of scenes in which Plath’s frustrations and struggles can play out.

From this the question arises – does her use of such controversial language actually work within the poem and enhance it as a work of art? The final answer must be up to the reader. We’ll let Sylvia Plath herself explain: ‘The speaker is a woman who has the great and terrible gift of being reborn. The only trouble is, she has to die first. She is the phoenix, the libertarian spirit, what you will. She is also just a good, plain, very resourceful woman.’

Sylvia Plath, introduction to 1962 BBC recording of Lady Lazarus reading: “Lady Lazarus is a poem of 28 stanzas, each with three short lines, 84 lines in total. On the page it resembles a slender chain, a tight-knit ladder of a poem which has to be negotiated carefully by the reader.”

Short lines tend to slow down the reading; the irregular rhythms (metrically) also have a stumbling effect as the poem progresses. Syntactically this poem is complex – momentum never quite builds, there is no sustained beat because of the short clauses, line length chops and heavy punctuation…end stops, dashes and so on. Alliteration

When words are close together in a line and begin with the same consonant they are alliterative, bringing texture and interest for the reader: face a featureless, fine…hearing of my heart…bit of blood…rise with my red. Anaphora

Is the repeat of words or phrases in clauses. This reinforces meaning and relates to cyclic acts or events. Stanza 16: I do it so it feels like hell. / I do it so it feels real.

Enjambment

When a line carries straight on without punctuation into the next line it is said to be enjambed. There is hardly a pause, or no pause for the reader. The sense or meaning also continues. There are several examples of enjambment, between lines and stanzas: “A sort of walking miracle, my skin / Bright as a Nazi lampshade, / My right foot / A paperweight,”

Metaphor

There are several examples, remembering that a metaphor is a figure of speech in which a non-literal word or phrase is used instead of the actual word or phrase: “I am your opus, / I am your valuable, / The pure gold baby.” Prosopopoeia

A figure of speech in which an absent or imagined person is represented as speaking. In stanza 19 – A miracle!”

Rhyme

Lady Lazarus is essentially a free verse poem – there is no set regular consistent rhyme scheme. Some lines do chime together however, with full rhyme. The first two lines for instance: I have done it again, / One year in every ten. There are irregular sets of full and slant rhyme which bring faint harmony and dissonance to the sounds as the poem progresses. Look for these combinations:

again/ten/skin/fine/linen/napkin/woman/bone/ten/seashell/call/well/hell//real/call/cell/pearls/miracle/stir/there/Lucifer/Beware/hair/air. enemy/terrify/be/me/thirty/die/day/baby. it/foot/weight/put/brute/shout/out. Three/see/tease/knees.

burn/concern. theatrical.

Simile

There are several examples of simile, when a comparison is made between one thing and another: “And like the cat I have nine times to die./And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls. / I rocked shut/As a seashell / I do it so it feels like hell /And I eat men like air.”

Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus” consists of twenty-eight stanzas, of three lines each. The structure, lyrical quality and simple diction, could befit a light-hearted poem. However, in depth analysis of the metaphors in the poem reveals that Plath has chosen to use such a form in order to dilute the impact of some serious and deeply disturbing emotions. The poem can be divided into three parts. In the first part, Plath gives a detailed description of the persona rising out of the grave, metaphorically based on the biblical story of Lazarus and his resurrection from the grave. This befits the title of the poem, “Lady Lazarus” and suggests that the persona is a Jewish woman.

The second part of the poem deals with the persona’s description of the suicide attempt she has survived. The persona confesses that she has unsuccessfully attempted

to kill herself three times. In the third part of the poem, Plath elaborates the NaziJew metaphor, intricately linking it with a religious metaphor. The persona describes how German doctors have brought her back from death. In the last stanza, the persona describes herself as the phoenix who has risen from the ashes. Thus, a second mythical character known of rising from death is used here. The poem ends with a warning of vengeance.

4. Q. In “Lady Lazarus,” does Plath show adoration towards a fascistic male?]

Plath wrote before radical feminism had begun to challenge the patriarchal assumptions that governed many aspects of Western society in the post-war era. A number of her late poems, however, mount a vitriolic – though at times conflicted – attack on the myths underpinning the conventions of male dominance. It is striking that in the drafts of ‘Lady Lazarus’ in the Plath Collection at Smith College, the male antagonist is initially presented not only as ‘Herr Enemy’, ‘Herr Lucifer’ and ‘Herr Doktor’ (that is, an evil doctor in a Nazi concentration camp), but as ‘My Great Love’.

Plath revised such ambivalences out of successive drafts, and chose to develop Lady Lazarus into a ruthless heroine rather than a wronged and grieving wife. Yet it is clear from the introduction that she made to a recording of the poem for the BBC in December of 1962 that Plath conceived of her speaker as performing her anger in a deliberate, self-conscious way, indeed as a stage in a regeneration myth: “The speaker is a woman who has the great and terrible gift of being reborn. The only trouble is, she has to die first. She is the phoenix, the libertarian spirit, what you will. She is also just a good, plain, very resourceful woman.”

Despite her incandescent rage, Lady Lazarus never manages to imagine herself escaping entirely from a relationship with ‘Herr Enemy’: he is needed as both witness to her appalling immolation (‘Ash, ash-/ You poke and stir. / Flesh, bone, there is nothing there -‘) and as one of the future victims of her reincarnated vampiric self: ‘Beware/ Beware’ she threatens him, assuming the role of the transgressive visionary seer of the end of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ (And all should cry Beware! Beware! / His flashing eyes, his floating hair). This allusion helps to give the incantatory rhymes of Plath’s closing lines (Herr Lucifer / Beware / Beware / red hair / like air’) a dangerous uncanny power, as if a spell or a curse.

In “Lady Lazarus,” for example, Plath collapses the “them and us” distinction by confronting readers with their voyeurism in looking at the subject of the poem. To apply Teresa De Lauretis’s theorizing of the cinematic positioning of women to Plath’s poem, in “Lady Lazarus,” the speaker’s consciousness of her performance for the readers (who are implicitly part of the “peanut-crunching crowd”) works to reverse the gaze of the readers so that they become “overlooked in the act of overlooking.”

By extension, in her parodic overstatement (Lady Lazarus as archetypal victim, archetypal object of the gaze) Plath highlights the performative (that is, constructed rather than essential) nature of the speaker’s positioning as object of the gaze, and so (to extend Judith Butler’s terms), Lady Lazarus enacts a performance that attempts to “compel a reconsideration of the place and stability” of her positioning, and to “enact and reveal the performativity” of her representation.

This sense of performativity and the reversal of gaze likewise extends, in “Lady Lazarus,” to compel reconsideration not only of the conventional positioning of the woman as object, and of the voyeurism implicit in all lyric poetry, but also of the historical metaphors as objects of the gaze. Readers feel implicated in the poem’s straightforward assignment and metaphorizing of the speaker in her role as object and performer, and contingently are made to feel uncomfortable about their similar easy assimilation of the imagery (of the suffering of the Jews) that the speaker uses. In “Daddy,” a similar relationship between reader, speaker, and metaphor is at work.

Critics have read Lady Lazarus…as exposing the artifice of modern femininity… Lady Lazarus looks more specifically at the construction and distortion of female subjectivity. It depicts the fragmentation of the female body whose dismemberment brings to mind the story of Diana and Actaeon – again from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Actaeon is torn apart by his own hounds as punishment for having attempted to see what should have remained unseen).

Lady Lazarus’s big strip tease (stanza ten) is, significantly, enforced by others. Although she assumes the voice of defiant bravado, it is others (them) who unwrap her. Thus she is coerced into performing, while seeming to authorise and enjoy, a spectacular femininity. Others have seen Lady Lazarus as an allegory of a psychotherapeutic return through successive stages to some point of origin – a process which is dominated by Herr Doktor who is also Herr Enemy – or as another attempt to negotiate the relationship between self and father, self and husband, and self and patriarchy in general (hence Herr God and Herr Lucifer in the final lines). It is also possible to argue that Lady Lazarus sounds an early note of caution about the direction which Plath’s work, along with that of other confessional poets of her time, seemed to be taking.

Plath expresses misgivings about the commodification of suffering (the charge, the very large charge) and the exploitation and self-exploitation which seem to underpin the mode. Lady Lazarus has become so important in Plath’s oeuvre perhaps because it allows readers coming from quite opposite theoretical positions to reach the same conclusions for different reasons.

The poem’s title, its final line, and much of what is in between, focus on annihilation, rebirth, and female power. Its title refers to the biblical story in which Christ brought Lazarus back from the dead. However, in this poem, it is a woman who comes back from the dead-on her own-without the help of a male/God figure. Not

only has she brought herself back from the dead, but she has done it three times (a number that has some significance in the Bible, also).

5.  [Q. What is the interplay between life and death in the poem “Lady Lazarus”?

Or, Q. What symbols of Holocaust and Nazism can you find in the poem Lady Lazarus?]

The most controversial aspect of the poem is the reference to the awful events at the Belsen concentration camp run by the Nazis in the second world war. Jews from all sorts of backgrounds were subject to the most gruesome experiments before being murdered.

Sylvia Plath was well aware of the provocative contents of her poem. She wrote: ‘What the person out of Belsen – physical or psychological – wants is nobody saying the birdies still go tweet-tweet, but the full knowledge that somebody else has been there and knows the worst, just what it is like.’ – Letter to Mother, Oct 1962

The speaker’s suffering in the poem relates to that of any individual who went through the trauma of the holocaust. Many critics have questioned Plath’s inclusion of Belsen and associated horrors; they see it as insensitive and gross. Equally it could be argued that an artist has a duty to provoke and challenge and that no subject should be taboo.

If identification with the victims who could not disidentify with their tormentors constitutes the trap of prosopopoeia in “Daddy,” the trope functions as a trip in “Lady Lazarus.” What does it mean to think of the imperilled Jews as-to borrow a phrase Maurice Blanchot used to approach the complex subject of Holocaust-related suicidesfetishized “masters of un-mastery”? The wronged speaker here can only liberate herself from “Herr Doktor” or “Herr Enemy” by wresting the power of persecution from him and turning it against herself. We know that the ongoingness of the torments of the Shoah perpetuated postwar suicides, but did those casualties mutate into mystic scapegoats whose envied status as paradigmatic victims would in turn generate ersatz survivor-celebrities?

This is one way to grasp the shock of “Lady Lazarus,” for the narcissistic and masochistic speaker has become obsessed with dying, relates to it as “a call.” With her skin “Bright as a Nazi lampshade,” her foot “A paperweight,” and her face “featureless, fine / Jew linen,” Lady Lazarus puts her damage on theatrical display through her scandalous suicide artistry (244). Have Jews been made to perform the Trauerspiel for a “peanut-crunching crowd” at the movies and on TV, like the striptease entertainer through whom Plath speaks? Does Lady Lazarus’s “charge” at making death feel “real” and at “the theatrical // Comeback” anticipate a contemporary theatricalization of the Holocaust? Certainly, her vengeful warning that “there is a

charge / for the hearing of my heart” evokes the charge the cheap thrill and the financial price and the emotional cost-of installations, novels, testimonials, college courses, critical essays, and museums dedicated to the six million.

The commodification of Lady Lazarus’s exhibitionism issues in spectators paying “For a word or a touch / Or a bit of blood // Or a piece of my hair or my clothes”; she brags about her expertise at the art of dying: “I do it so it feels like hell. / I do it so it feels real”. The spectacular quality of Plath’s figure adumbrated the notorious celebrity of a writer like Benjamin Wilkomirski, whose gruesome bestseller Fragments (about a child’s experiences in the camps) was praised as “free of literary artifice of any kind” before it was judged to be a fraud. In remarks that gloss Plath’s suicideperformer’s pandering to her audience, Daniel Ganzfried argued that Wilkomirski’s suicide would be read as an authentication of his identity as a victim: “These people talking about suicide will suggest it to him. . . . Some of his supporters would love him dead because then it looks like proof that he’s Wilkomirski.”

Plath’s poetry broods upon-just as Ganzfried’s argument reiterates-the contamination of the very idea of the genuine. As Blanchot cautions, ” If there is, among all words, one that is inauthentic, then surely it is the word `authentic.” To the extent that the impresario of Plath’s stage, “Herr God” / “Herr Lucifer,” has reduced Lady Lazarus from a person to an “opus” or a “valuable,” the poem hints that even reverential post-Shoah remembrances may be always-already defiled by the Nazi perpetrators-that prosopopoeia will not enable the poet to transcend the tarnished uses to which the past has been, can be, will be put. In the voice of a denizen of disaster, Plath mocks the frisson stimulated by the cultural industry she herself helped to spawn.

Revolted by her own dehumanization, Lady Lazarus then imagines triumphing over the murderous Nazis by turning vengeful herself, if only in the incendiary afterlife conferred by the oven: “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.”

As it feeds on “men like air”-predatory psychic dictators but also perhaps men turned to smoke-the red rage that rises out of the ashes only fuels self-combustion, debunking the idea of transcendence or rebirth at the end of the poem. With its ironic echo of the conclusion of Coleridge’s “Kubla Kahn”-“Beware, beware, his flashing eyes, his floating hair”-“Lady Lazarus” repudiates Romantic wonder at the power of the artist, replacing the magical “pleasure dome” of his artifice with the detritus to which the Jewish people were reduced.

The poem’s speech act amounts to a caustic assessment of the aesthetic sellout, the disaster-imposter luminary: “there is nothing there ” That no consensus exists among contemporary historians over whether the Nazis made cakes of soap out of their victims (though they certainly did “manufacture” hair and skin, rings and fillings

and bones) drives home the bitter irony that propels the poem, namely that imaginative approaches to the Shoah may distort, rather than safeguard, the dreadful but shredded historical record. Reenactments of the calamity, including her own, are indicted, even as Plath issues a warning that they will take their toll.

Will the figure of prosopopoeia, so seductive for poets from Jarrell and Plath to Simic and Rich, outlive its functions as the Holocaust and its atrocities recede into a past to which no one alive can provide firsthand testimony? Or will the imperatives of “post-memory” imbue this rhetorical strategy-which insists on returning to the unbearable rupture of suffering-with newfound resonance once the Shoah can no longer be personally recalled? Given the passage of time as well as the flood of depictions of the catastrophe, the very vacuity of the desecrated (buried alive, incinerated, unburied, dismembered) bodies that licensed the personifications of prosopopoeia may make verse epitaphs seem shoddily inadequate. Plath’s taunting sneer-“I turn and burn. / Do not think I underestimate your great concern”chronologically preceded the highly profitable entertainment industry the Holocaust business has so recently become.

However, besides forecasting it, “Lady Lazarus” offers up a chilling warning about the fetishization of suffering with which the figure of prosopopoeia flirts. Indeed, Plath’s verse uncannily stages the bases for accusations of exploitation, larceny, masochism, and sensationalism that would increasingly accrue around Holocaust remembrance. In addition, her impersonation of the real victims invariably generates awareness of the spurious representation put in the place of the absence of evidence. Calling attention to what Geoffrey Hartman and Jean Baudrillard term our propensity to adopt a “necrospective,” poems deploying prosopopoeia draw us closer to an event that is, simultaneously, distanced by their debased status as merely simulated and recycled image-substitutions.

 

6. [Q. Discuss the various imagery used by Plath in ‘Lady Lazarus.’ Or, Q. How are the images in Sylvia Plath’s poem “Lady Lazarus” meaningful and effective?]

Plath describes the speaker’s oppression with the use of World War II Nazi Germany allusions and images. [¹] It is known as one of her “Holocaust poems”, along with “Daddy” and “Mary’s Song”.[¹] She develops a German image to denote Nazism and in turn, oppression. She accounts this connotation to the doctors in the poem, such as calling the doctor Herr Doktor, because they continue to bring her back to life when all she wants is to finally die. This is the speaker’s third time facing death. She faces once every decade; the first was an accident and the second a failed attempt at reaching death.

At the end of the poem, when the speaker experiences the unwanted rebirth,

she is represented by the image of a phoenix (a mythical bird that is burned alive and then reborn in the ashes). This next decade will be different for the speaker because she plans to ‘eat’ the men, or doctors, so they cannot revive her next time she faces death.

The poem alludes to the mythological bird called the phoenix.[3] The speaker describes her unsuccessful attempts at committing suicide not as failures, but as successful resurrections, like those described in the tales of the biblical character Lazarus and the myth of the phoenix. By the end of the poem, the speaker has transformed into a firebird, effectively marking her rebirth, which some critics liken to a demonic transformation.

The poem details the tragic life of a lady and her several suicide attempts. She says that she has tried to kill herself many times, but surprisingly survived every time. She asks those who saved her from peeling off the napkin from her face and see her wounded soul. She compares her suffering to Nazi prisoners to make the readers understand the reason for her discontent. As the poem progresses, she provides graphic details of physical and the mentality effects of suicide. She lashes out on her doctors and those who take her as an object of entertainment. She concludes by calling herself a phoenix, rising from the ashes.

‘Dying is an art, like everything else’: ‘Lady Lazarus’, as the poem’s title implies, is a poem about resurrection – but implicit within its title, and Sylvia Plath’s reference to the man whom Jesus brought back from the dead, is the idea of annihilation or extinction, a theme that is never far away from us with a Plath poem. You can read ‘Lady Lazarus’ here before proceeding to our analysis below.

Sylvia Plath wrote ‘Lady Lazarus’ in October 1962, only a few months before her suicide, and the poem is shot through with references to her previous suicide attempts. Sigmund Freud, in his 1920 book Beyond the Pleasure Principle, had described Thanatos or the death-drive – what Philip Larkin called ‘desire of oblivion’ – as a compulsion to repeat, and this is how ‘Lady Lazarus’ begins: with a reference to having ‘done’ something ‘again’, the something or ‘it’ being suicide, or attempted suicide. For Plath, her suicide attempts represent a sort of death, and her survival is more of a coming back from the dead than a mere continuation of living.

The death-imagery in the poem and references to suicide are darkened further by allusions to the Holocaust: death not on an individual scale but mass genocide against the Jewish population (Plath herself was part-Jewish). The ‘Nazi lampshade’ and references to ‘Herr Doktor’, ‘Herr Enemy’, ‘Herr God’, and ‘Herr Lucifer’ all evoke the recent atrocities of the Holocaust and place Plath’s own longing for extinction uneasily within the context of the mass-murder of those who were actually killed, and not by their own hands. But ‘Doktor’ here also doubles up as a reference to Plath’s doctors and psychiatrists who treated her, both when she attempted suicide and when she underwent electroconvulsive therapy for her depression.

Another aspect of ‘Lady Lazarus’ – which is alluded to in Plath’s reference to the ‘peanut-crunching crowd’ – is the idea of suffering as spectacle, a theatre of cruelty to which people might pay to see: what the novelist J. G. Ballard, less than a decade later, would call the ‘atrocity exhibition’. And hiding within these references is the uneasy knowledge that Plath may secretly like the idea of making a spectacle of her suffering: ‘dying is an art’, as she famously puts it in this poem; something she does ‘exceptionally well’.

Ideas of death and resurrection – of, in a way, surviving or conquering death, which is a theme that characterises Ted Hughes’s poetry too, such as his ‘Examination at the Womb Door’ from his later sequence Crow-abound in ‘Lady Lazarus’, so it’s worth stopping to analyse a few of them. When Plath’s speaker announces, ‘like the cat I have nine times to die’, she acknowledges the old folk-belief that cats have nine lives: a proverb that implies the idea of cheating death, an idea that is, of course, fallacious, for cats are just as mortal as any other creature. And perhaps chief among all of these images of resurrection and rebirth is that of the phoenix. ‘Lady Lazarus’ ends with an allusion to this mythical bird which rose from its own funeral pyre. Like another late poem ‘Elm’, ‘Lady Lazarus’ is about rebirth but it is a dark and despairing take on the idea.

Sylvia Plath completed her masterpiece, Lady Lazarus, in the days prior to her suicide in 1963, while in a state of disturbance, distress, and obsession. To Plath, this was not just a poem; rather a message to others about her life, her enemies, and her struggles with everything from her family to mental stability. Lady Lazarus conveys Plath’s real life suicide attempts, parallels to her classic novel, The Bell Jar, as well as a biblical allusion in its title, resulting in a horrific, yet detailed annotation of her psychological troubles.

Within the first three lines of her autobiographical poem, Plath endows the reader with a strong image and message, by simply stating she has attempted suicide three times. Plath proclaims, “I have done it again. / One year in every ten / I manage it —————.” She is ultimately implying suicide attempts have plagued her at age ten, twenty, and thirty. However, in real life, Sylvia Plath did not attempt suicide at age ten, but we are able to deduce the fact that her father died when Sylvia was eight or nine years old. This could possibly relate to suicide, because her soul died, and her father’s death haunted and upset her throughout her life. Plath also fails to further mention her first suicide attempt at age 20, while she was a student at Smith College.

As blatantly stated, Sylvia Plath’s mastery with these powerful tercets, creates vivid images, and entices the reader from the first line. The sixth stanza of Lady Lazarus speaks of Plath’s second suicide attempt, which left Plath almost paralyzed – mentally, emotionally, and physically. Stanza six of Lady Lazarus reads: Soon, soon the flesh / The grave cave ate will be / At home on me.

Lines 25 through 27 are also in relation to Plath’s 1953 suicide attempt because of the news headlines Plath made when her mother found her unconscious and vomiting in the basement crawl space, as well as the lengths that friends and family went to, in order to find her. This is not the sole deduction that can be formed about line 25; it also holds meaning to Plath’s use of biblical allusion in the title. Plath predominantly speaks of “a million filaments” and “the peanut crunching crowd.” The “peanut crunching crowd” is analogous to Plath’s family members who were eager to aid in searching for her upon her disappearance, as well as strangers who watched as the event unfolded via the press and media, considering Plath’s disappearance received national attention.

In the same respect the use of “a million filaments” can be related to the flashbulbs of the reporters when the press flocked to Plath upon her discovery in the crawl space and revival at McLean. Plath speaks of her persona like that of a cat; she has nine times to die. In total, Plath’s suicide attempts numbered at three, and she was successful on the fourth, in which she took her life by creating a gas chamber of sorts in the kitchen of her London flat. Plath creatively uses the line,” What a trash / To annihilate each decade”, to imply that she has attempted suicide three times, once in each decade, first when she was 19, and again at age 20 and 30. Thus, suicide and, moreover, the death of loved ones (her mother and father), plagued each decade of her rather short life. Plath’s final unveiling of her own life’s events and her chronicle of suicide can be seen in stanza 14 when she utters the words: As a sea shell. / They had to call and call / And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

In essence, the entire poem can be seen as an allegorical account of Plath’s battle with “Herr Doktor” and rising from the dead, just like Lazarus. Many of Plath’s tercets and lines have dual meanings that relate not only to real life and The Bell Jar, but this continual allegory and struggle between “Herr Doktor” and herself.

In line 25, Plath speaks of “a million filaments.” She is not speaking simply about flashbulbs, she is also speaking of the electricity passing through her body from EST (Electric Shock Therapy), which she endured because of “Herr Doktor” at McLean. Through EST, the psychiatrist/doctor can be equated to Jesus in the story of Lazarus; he brings Sylvia Plath from psychiatric pain or a low point in her life to better health, parallel to Lazarus.

The title “Lady Lazarus” also contains yet another intriguing element that Plath used to reveal her feelings. In his essay, “Lady Lazarus – An Essay Review “, David M. Heaton states, “The title ironically identifies a sort of human oxymoron, a female Lazarus-not the biblical male.” Plath does not conform to the standards of society of being ladylike, instead Plath wants to break free and be separate – a free and untainted woman.

As previously stated, “Herr Doktor” like Jesus, resurrects Lazarus for his own acknowledgement, thus Plath tries to equate that difference with the title. In her state

of anger and revenge in this allegorical annotation, she uses “I” twenty two times and “my” nine times. Thus, she reveals to the reader that “Herr Doktor” may be helping her for his own recognition, but she will not let that stop her from avenging herself. Considering Sylvia Plath’s suicide attempts, one may equate this Lazarus with Plath. Self-destruction is inevitable in the poem, just as it was in Plath’s real life. Lazarus is resurrected from death; if we equate Lazarus with the mythical feminist version of Plath, we can see the parallel.

Plath is ‘Lady Lazarus’ and is reincarnated after each suicide attempt, thus, she is like a cat, and has nine times to die, furthermore leading to Plath’s infamous thought, “Dying / is an art, like everything else. / I do it exceptionally well.” Sylvia Plath has created more than a poem in “Lady Lazarus”, she has fashioned a detailed work of art that chronicles not only her suicide attempts, but the events of her later life. Plath’s creative use of biblical allusion changes the poem from a portrayal of suicide to an allegory that conveys her obsessions, weakness, and feelings, while retaining a morbid sensation. “Lady Lazarus” is a psychological journey and creation in which Plath must rise above “Herr Enemies”, “Herr Doktor” and her inner mental struggles.

 

7. [Q. Evaluate the confessional elements in Plath’s ‘ Lady Lazarus.’]

Although Plath’s ‘confessional’ tropes are often seen in terms of a Romantic parable of victimization, whether of the sensitive poetic individual crushed by a brutally rationalized society, or of feminist protest against a monolithic patriarchal oppressor, her self-reflexivity tends to turn confession into a parody gesture or a premiss for theatrical performance. The central instance of the ‘confessional’ in her writing is usually taken to be ‘Lady Lazarus’. M. L. Rosenthal uses the poem to validate the generic category: ‘Robert Lowell’s ‘Skunk Hour’ and Sylvia Plath’s ‘Lady Lazarus’ are true examples of ‘confessional’ poetry because they put the speaker himself at the centre of the poem in such a way as to make his psychological shame and vulnerability an embodiment of his civilization.’

The confessional reading of the poem is usually underpinned by the recourse to biography, which correlates the speaker’s cultivation of the art of dying’ with Plath’s suicidal career. Although Plath is indeed, at one level, mythologizing her personal history, the motif of suicide in ‘Lady Lazarus’ operates less as self-revelation than as a theatrical tour de force, a music-hall routine.

Lady Lazarus is an allegorical figure, constructed from past and present images of femininity, congealed fantasies projected upon the poem’s surface. She is a pastiche of the numerous deathly or demonic women of poetic tradition, such as Foe’s Ligeia, who dies and is gruesomely revivified through the corpse of another woman. Ligeia’s function, which is to be a symbol, mediating between the poet and ‘supernal beauty’,

can only be preserved by her death. Similarly, in Mallarme’s prose poem ‘Le Phenomene Futur’, the ‘Woman of the Past’ is scientifically preserved and displayed at a círcus sideshow by the poet.

For Plath, however, the woman on show, the ‘female phenomenon’ is a revelation of unnaturalness instead of sensuous nature, her body gruesomely refashioned into Nazi artefacts. Lady Lazarus yokes together the canonical post-Romantic, symbolist tradition which culminates in ‘Prufrock’, and the trash culture of True Confessions, through their common concern with the fantasizing and staging of the female body: “I rocked shut / As a seashell. / They had to call and call / And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.”

Lady Lazarus stages the spectacle of herself, assuming the familiar threefold guise of actress, prostitute, and mechanical woman. The myth of the eternally recurring feminine finds its fulfilment in the worship and ‘martyrdom’ of the film or pop star, a cult vehicle of male fantasy who induces mass hysteria and vampiric hunger for ‘confessional’ revelations. Lady Lazarus reminds her audience that ‘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. It is as if Plath is using the Marilyn Monroe figure to travesty Poe’s dictum in ‘The Philosophy of Composition’ (1846) that ‘the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world’.

The proliferation of intertextual ironies also affects the concluding transformation of ‘Lady Lazarus’ into the phoenix-like, man-eating demon, who rises ‘out of the ash’ with her ‘red hair’. This echoes Coleridge’s description of the possessed poet in ‘Kubla Khan’: ‘And all should cry Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair!’ The woman’s hair, a privileged fetish-object of male fantasy, becomes at once a badge of daemonic genius and a flag of vengeance. It is tempting to read these lines as a personal myth of rebirth, a triumphant Romantic emergence of what Lynda Bundtzen calls the female body of imagination’.

The poem begins on the real plane: ‘I have done it again’. Sylvia Plath had made another attempt at suicide, after ten years of a previous one. Then she goes on to describe the situation, focusing especially on her body first. But the very second tercet introduces Plath’s concern for the torture of the Jews: she compares her skin with the lampshade that the Nazi concentration camps made by flaying the Jew’s skin! Then another important stylistic element of the poem, that of surrealistic images, is also immediately introduced: the speaker irrationally compares her feet with a paperweight and her face with linen cloth, that the Jews wear.

She then addresses the reader as her ‘enemy’, assuming that the reader is just the same male. In the fifth tercet, Plath presents an image of her own dead body foreboding (and foreshadowing) her death. The image is horrible, but it seems that the speaker is trying to come to terms with death that she was trying to embrace by rejecting life and people. She continues the vision in the next two stanzas also:

she says that her flesh will soon be eaten by the grave. She is only thirty-one, and she has attempted three times. She finds it boring to attempt it again and again, and also irritating when a crowd of people surrounds to see her after the failed attempt at suicide.

Plath tells a personal truth; she was ten when she tried it for the first time. The second time she had meant to do it earnestly. But they pulled her back into life. She says she has an affinity and skill at death; dying, she says, is an art, and she does it exceptionally well. But the comeback is theatrical, coming to the same place, the same faces, the same brutes who call the rescue (and new life they think they have given her) a miracle. But there is a cost (charge) for all the things they do; the doctors, especially take advantage of it. The mention of doctor reminds her of the German doctors who experimented on the dead bodies of the Jews in the concentration camps. “So, so, Herr (Mr.) Doktor (German spelling). So Herr Enemy… Her God, Herr Lucifer…” this disgust and rage against the doctor, god and Satan brings the poem round to the general humanitarian protest that is at the symbolic center of the poem.

This reminds her of the many images of torture of the Jews by the Germans in the Second World War, “I am your opus”, says the poet, to the doctor identifying herself with the victim on whom the doctor is going to perform an operation for learning something about the human body! Similarly, she is also the corpse for the scavengers to collect gold ornaments, for the ‘dentists’ to look for golden teeth, and for the German industry owner to make soap out of the fat from her body. The German actually did all these during the war! The second-last stanza however turns the table on all the enemies: Plath borrows the phrase “Beware, beware” from ST Coleridge to mean that the female poet has been born out of this atrocious murder, and so the people are now to be cautious of her.

In Coleridge, the persona wishes that if he could revive the original, mythical power of music and poetry, he would be regarded as a heavenly inspired man, awesome to everyone. But here, Plath suggests that a vengeance female figure has been born and will “eat men like air”. This also suggests the birth of the Phoenix from the ashes of the traditionally burnt women. She means that all the traditions, including social, political, cultural and literary have tortured and destroyed the female identity; but now a new woman is being born. This poem can also be seen as an allegory of the feminist uprising in the sixties.

A companion piece to “Daddy” in which the poet again fuses the worlds of personal pain and cooperative suffering, is “Lady Lazarus”. In this poem a disturbing tension is established between the seriousness of the experience described and the misleadingly light form of the poem. The vocabulary and rhythms which approximate to the colloquial simplicity of conversational speech, the frequently end-stopped lines, the repetitions which have the effect of mockingly counteracting the violence of the meaning, all establish the deliberately flippant note which this poem strives to achieve. There is a shifting tone of “Lady Lazarus” : 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.

The reaction of the crowd who push in with morbid interest to see the saved suicide mimics the attitude of many to the revelations of the concentration camps; there is a brutal insistence on the pain which many apparently manage to see with scientific detachment. “Lady Lazarus” represents an extreme use of the “light verse” technique. It is also a supreme example of Plath’s skill as an artist. She takes very personal, painful material and controls and forms it with the utmost rigour into a highly wrought poem, which is partly effective because of the polar opposition between the terrible gaiety of its form and the fiercely uncompromising seriousness of its subject.

 

 

8 .[Q. Discuss the poem ‘Lady Lazarus as a dramatic monologue.]

The poem Lady Lazarus by Sylvia Plath like many other protest poems should be analyzed from a psychological point of view, as an outpour of a neurotic energy through the channel of creative art, or poetry. It is in a sense a kind of therapy. Though it is slightly autobiographical, the poem must be interpreted symbolically and psychologically without limiting it to the poetess’s life experience alone. The extremity of anger in this poem is not justifiable as something possible with a normal person in real life. We should understand that this is partly due to the neurosis that Plath was actually suffering from. Besides, it is essential to understand from the psychoanalytic point of view, that the poem does not literally express reality alone: it is the relieving anger and frustration, and an alternative outlet of the neurotic energy in the form of poetic expression.

Furthermore, it is necessary to understand the anger as being directed against the general forces of inhumanity, violence and destruction only symbolized by the males in the poem. By a process of association and surrealism, the protest moves from common males to Hitler, his experimenting doctor, the scavengers of gold on dead Jews, the dentists who had a turn before the corpses were disposed of for leather, soap, nightshades and fertilizer! The individual is associatively linked to inhumanity and oppression.

Sylvia Plath said that her “Personal experience is very important, but I believe poetry should be relevant to larger things such as Hiroshima and Dachau and so on.” This means that the frustration and anger against a dominating father, or anyone for that matter, becomes a starting point or central symbol for larger issues including Hitler, torture and inhumanity. The poem is, therefore, also about the victimization of modern war. The persona is not only real people: they are types. The poem is less autobiographical than it is universal. …..

In fact, the theme of universal female protest in the modern world is the most

striking theme in the poem. The female speaker represents the creative force and she is angry with the destructive forces symbolized by males. The allusions of the Second World War are all real. The anger against the German soldiers, Hitler and his Nazi party is not too much. The reader will justify this anger if he tries to imagine the inhumanity of Hitler.

Though the speaker intended to die, just yielding to death will not annihilate her. She completes the poem with a final comeback. The poem is technically a (bitter) dramatic monologue. The title ironically identifies a female Lazarus; whereas the original Lazarus was male, whom Christ brought back to life, the present speaker is identifying herself with a Lazarus different in sex, behavior, and everything.

Plath’s persona is a figure who wants to subvert all that she can of the tradition that attempts to bring you back and torture, rather than let you choose death and die! This female figure also represents the oppressed modern woman conscious of the fact that the male society will bring her back to life, because it needs to satisfy itself by oppressing the woman. The poem destroys the myth; it borrows it to reject and state an antithesis. The poem’s persona does not conform to society’s traditional idea of lady-like behavior. She is angry and she wants to take revenge in every way. She owes only to herself, not to Jesses. Self-destruction pervades the poem as it did Plath’s life.

As confession mutates to myth, subjectivity inclines to generalized feeling. Having taken up the battle with the enemy on his terms, she concluded by warning the male deity and demon that when she rises from the ashes, she will consume men as fire does; she will return from death like the sphinx and eat men like vampires, or fire. It is psychologically and symbolically about the aspiration to revenge that is felt by all the female victims of male domination, once they become conscious of the domination. The revenge would be against the institutions that dominate women.

The poem is about a woman’s wish to turn the tables on the father and his kind. Its dramatic overstatement of male evil may sound intolerable to some readers, but it must be taken to poetically express the resentment in the female mind that was suppressed for ages against all kinds of injustice upon them by society and traditions, rather than buy individual makes upon individual females. The anger will be justified if one thinks of the extremity of long-borne suffering of women through the ages.

The myth of Lazarus is transformed in this poem into the myth of the reincarnating phoenix, the bird which immolates itself very five hundred years but rises whole and rejuvenated from its ashes. Besides, the bird has become a being that reincarnates not just to remain immortal, but to take revenge on its adversaries. Sylvia Plath provided a self explanation during a radio reading. “The speaker is a woman who has the great and terrible gift of being reborn. The only trouble is, she has to die first. She is the phoenix, the libertarian spirit, what you will.”

The poem is written in 28 stanzas that are suggestive of the 28 days of the

normal female menstrual cycle, or in a sense, their rebirth. The reproductive cycle echoes the creativity of the female poet; but here the creativity is also destructive of that entire stand against the female pursuit, including her freedom to die. The poem is said to evolve from many kinds of losses and tragedies that Plath experienced and wanted to turn into positive advantages; this poem can be called an attempt to interpret her suicidal attempt as a process to transform herself, whether she succeeded or failed. Plath experienced many losses, including abortion, miscarriage, childbirth, severe postpartum depression, divorce, and the like. She probably wanted to convert these into achievements, as a source of illumination and energy to fight against the adverse forces in order to survive.

Lady Lazarus defines the central aesthetic principles of Plath’s late poetry. First, the poem derives its dominant effects from the colloquial language. From the conversational opening (“I have done it again”) to the clipped warnings of the ending (‘Beware/ Beware”). Lady Lazarus appears as the monologue of a woman speaking spontaneously out of her pain and psychic disintegration. The Latinate terms (“annihilate,” “filaments,” “opus,” “valuable”) are introduced as sudden contrasts to the essentially simple language of the speaker. The obsessive repetition of key words and phrases gives enormous power to the plain style used throughout. As she speaks, Lady Lazarus seems to gather up her energies for an assault on her enemies, and the staccato repetitions of phrases build up the intensity of feelings.

This is language poured out of some burning inner fire, though it retains the rhythmic precision that we expect from a much less intensely felt expression. It is also a language made up almost entirely of monosyllables. Plath has managed to adapt a heightened conversational stance and a colloquial idiom to the dramatic monologue form.

9. [Q. Can Sylvia Plath’s ‘Lady Lazarus be considered as a representative poem of death? Discuss.]

In “Lady Lazarus” by Sylvia Plath, there are many different poetic devices that are chosen to portray the speaker’s tone. Throughout the poem, the speaker seems to be talking about death at a glance it seems like she is happy with the thought of death. But if we dissect the literary elements that Plath uses we can see that death is far from a happy topic, it is disastrous to her. The speaker’s tone throughout the poem tells us how depressed she is about the entire idea of death. Plath uses diction, images, sounds and repetition to set up the foundation of the poem. The choice of words used throughout this poem helps portray the tone.

The images that are described through the speaker’s experiences on death show her emotions about death. These events give a vivid description which helps us understand her attitude towards death. The repetition and sounds set a certain

mood and stress on some important aspects of death. Through these literary methods it helps the reader get a better understanding of Plath’s true feelings towards death.

Also, there are words that describe actions taking place when death attempts occur. For example, “annihilate”, “The peanut-crunching crowd / Shoves in to see”, “I rocked shut” and “That knocks me out” shows negative action towards death. First of all, annihilate means to destroy, which gives a downbeat connotation towards the tone of the poem. Then, the crowd refers to the others and their discouragement in this woman’s life, which leads to disappointment and an unconstructive tone towards death in the poem. Then the last two examples describe the speaker’s feelings towards a hopeless end to life. This type of diction used to accentuate the tone of the poem further supports the pessimistic nature.

Lastly, another use of diction in Plath’s poem is words associated with death and therefore, internally affect the tone of the poem. First, in line fourteen they use the word “vanish” which means to go away and never come back. This word is directly related to what death means and in using this word suggests that there is death involved in this particular poem, and the attitude towards it is not positive. Also, with the use of words like this explain why there is a lot of animosity towards death and the activities that support it, “Soon, soon the flesh / The grave cave”. These connotations in this poem talk and discuss death in general. The key words in this example that show death is “flesh” and “grave cave”.

Normally, people do not talk about flesh unless they are discussing the skin of a dead person. Then, in the next line choosing the words grave cave shows again the horrible connotation towards death because that describes where people lay in peace, when they have passed away. Again showing what she knows and wants when she dies is expressed by her fears signified by the connotation of the cave. The cave indicates a hiding place or somewhere to go and get away or hide from one’s problems.

Lastly, “I do it so it feels like hell” points out very clearly her approach towards death and with the use of the word, “hell” viewing the connections of her wants in pain, both in the present and in the future. This line indicates that hatred towards her life and others influences in general depicts her depressing tone of the poem. This also correlates to her boring and lonely life she lives. This is why diction is a very essential tool that Plath uses to show her emotional journey of death and her attitude towards it. As shown through many different word choices it expresses her true feelings towards this issue and the down, depressing tone that she has on death.

Next, there are other types of images that show and describe other people’s reactions or interpretations of death and dying. “What a million filaments / The peanut-crunching crowd” illustrate the audience and peers’ interpretations of the woman. The image of the filaments represents a thin line that burns out easily, and compares to the woman’s life, which is a thin string holding on. Then how she explains her life being short clarifies the awful tone she portrays.

In addition, the crowd is an image that there are many people watching her go through her terrible life and struggling journey, and they are just there to watch not to help or participate in any way, like a crowd at a baseball game eating peanuts. This loss of caring towards the woman emphasizes again, the attitude towards death. Another use of imagery in this poem that Plath uses to give emphasis is an image that occurs after an attempt to one of her suicides, “And picks the worms off me like sticky pearls”. This disturbing image shows and expresses the mood towards death in this poem. These words are so descriptive that they make a huge impact on the reader, which can make them cringe or feel uncomfortable. Those types of feelings that the reader may think of or sense supports the reasoning tone of the poem. Next, another image that supports the tone creates scenery after someone has been burned or cremated, “Ash, ash- / You poke and stir. / Flesh, bone, there is nothing there-“. Depicting this image are words that are only used when talking about death in a negative way. For example, flesh and bone are descriptions of the body, but when someone is alive they don’t describe their body as flesh and bone. Using this type of diction and imagery shows the impact that it has on the deathly attitude of the tone.

Lastly, the image that Plath uses to sum up the poem correlates back to the title. “Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air”, explains the “rising” of her death because of her multiple failures with suicide. Then in the last line she describes the image of eating the air, which explains her hatred for men, as well as life, but she continues to have to live and breath both the air of men and life. These images that describe death events, and other influences and reactions towards death are shown throughout the poem.

Finally, in addition to diction and images, the last poetic devices that Plath utilizes to accentuate the attitude towards death are rhyme and sounds. Plath makes use of rhyme, sound and repetition to reiterate the points and the messages that she is trying to get across. This shows that repetition reiterates the emphasis of the attitude towards dying. This method used by Plath drills the message and the negative tone into the reader to show the real feelings and emotions that are being expressed.

In the next stanza, again Plath utilizes sounds to pierce the statement into the minds of the audience. “It’s easy enough to do it in a cell. / It’s easy enough to do it stay put” explicates the true frustration of this woman speaker and the depressing tone that she is restating. Next, repetition of objects also emphasizes the attitude and tone of the speaker. For example, A cake of soap, / A wedding ring, / A gold filling” are all objects left behind from a cremation therefore, suggest a low and down tone to the poem. Lastly, the repetition of the word “Beware” implies that there is fear and no reassurance that there is any positive connotation to these words. Therefore, all of this repetition and sounds that are used express and dramatically show the bitter tone of the speaker through her attitude.

In conclusion, Plath’s exercises various poetic devices that emphasize the attitude

towards death by the speaker. Diction as a poetic device shows though the choices that Plath makes in the selection of her words to depict the unenthusiastic tone of the poem. Then, the next poetic device used is imagery, which was the most effective device because of the vivid images the audience can imagine in their own minds. This approach also represents the depressing attitude and tone towards death. Lastly, the sounds and repetition are also used to show and express the downing aspects of the poem, including the tone and the attitude of the speaker. All together they make up just some of the important poetic devices that are being used in this poem that can analyze the speaker’s attitude towards death, which clearly is deadly.

 

10 . [Q. Produce a critical estimate of Plath’s confessional poem ‘Lady Lazarus’.]

“Lady Lazarus” is a complicated, dark, and brutal poem originally published in the collection Ariel. Plath composed the poem during her most productive and fecund creative period. It is considered one of Plath’s best poems, and has been subject to a plethora of literary criticism since its publication. It is commonly interpreted as an expression of Plath’s suicidal attempts and impulses. Its tone veers between menacing and scathing, and it has drawn attention for its use of Holocaust imagery, similar to “Daddy.” The title is an allusion to the Biblical character, Lazarus, whom Jesus raised from the dead.

The poem can also be understood through a feminist lens, as a demonstration of the female artist’s struggle for autonomy in a patriarchal society. Lynda K. Bundtzen writes that “the female creation of a male-artist god is asserting independent creative powers.” From this perspective, “Lady Lazarus” is not merely a confessional poem detailing depressive feelings, but is also a statement on how the powerful male figure usurps Plath’s creative powers but is defeated by her rebirth. Though Lady Lazarus knows that “Herr Doktor” will claim possession of her body and remains after forcing her suicide, she equally believes she will rise and “eat men like air.” Her creative powers can be stifled momentarily, but will always return stronger.

The poem can also be understood in a larger context, as a comment on the relationship between poet and audience in a society that, as Pamela Annas claims, has separated creativity and consumption. The crowd views Lady Lazarus/the poet/ Plath as an object, and therefore does not recognize her as a human being. Plath reflects this through her multiple references to body parts separated from the whole. From this interpretation, Lady Lazarus’s suicide then becomes “an assertion of wholeness, an act of self-definition, and a last desperate act of contempt toward the peanut-crunching crowd.” The only way she can keep herself intact is to destroy herself, and she does this rather than be turned into commodities. Though “Herr Docktor” will peruse her remains for commodities, she will not have been defeated because of her final act.

As has often been the case in Plath’s poems, the Holocaust imagery has drawn

much attention from critics and readers. It is quite profuse in this poem. Lady Lazarus addresses a man as “Herr Dokter,” “Herr Enemy,” “Herr God,” and “Herr Lucifer.” She describes her face as a “Nazi lampshade” and as a”Jew linen.” As previously described, one effect of these allusions is to implicate the reader, make him or her complicit in passive voyeurism by comparing him or her to the Germans who ignored the Holocaust. However, they also serve to establish the horrific atmosphere than be understood as patriarchy, as a society of consumers, or as simply cruel humans. No matter how one interprets the crowd in the poem, they complicate the poem’s meaning so that it is a sophisticated exploration of the responsibility we have for each other’s unhappiness, rather than simply a dire, depressive suicide note.

Lady Lazarus is one of Sylvia Plath’s best known poems. Written in the final few months of 1962, it is one of several powerful poems Plath wrote in quick succession, before her death on 11th February 1963. Lady Lazarus is not a raw, direct confessional poem, despite that first person conversational opening line, but a melodramatic monologue on the subject of identity.

For Sylvia Plath, identity had a strong, inherent existential element. Her German father died prematurely when she was eight years old, leaving her emotionally bereft. She nearly drowned when 10 years old whilst swimming out to sea. Many think this was an attempted suicide. This incident is mentioned in the poem. Later on in life she again attempted suicide and failed. Bouts of depression throughout her adult life had to be treated with medication and electroconvulsive shocks. In the poem the speaker compares herself to a cat, having nine lives. But she also grotesquely states: “Dying is an art, like everything else. / I do it exceptionally well.”There is also parody, performance and pain but in the end the reader is left in little doubt that the speaker, a suffering woman out for revenge, is reborn as a mythological creature capable of eating men.

pro Male characters play an important role in Plath’s poetry and in Lady Lazarus they feature prominently. The fact that she used German words – Herr Doktor, Herr Enemy and so on – relates to her father, who was German. She had a complex relationship with Otto Plath. Her poem ‘Daddy’ attests to this. Her marriage to fellow poet Ted Hughes ended in the summer of 1962 when Sylvia Plath got to know of an affair between Hughes and one Assia Wevill. This must have influenced the tone of the poem with regards to the warning given to all males near the end.

It is clear from reading biographies and her letters that the final few months of Sylvia Plath’s life were a mix of creative highs and devastating emotional and psychological lows. She never could quite find a tolerable way through.

The first stanza is always an important part of the poem as very often would one find the crux of the whole poem in it. As for this poem, the first stanza was referring to the persona’s various suicide attempts throughout her life. She’s saying she’s done it again, and she has made another attempt at taking her own life. When she says one year in every ten she has attempted to kill herself, she says this in a

way that gives the impression that she doesn’t see this as a very big deal, it’s just something that happens every so often.

Although at first it seems like the poet is actually committing suicide, it’s actually a symbolism for oppression, female being the victims in a male dominated world, the dilemmas of women in a patriarchal society to say the least. Another interesting line in the poem was: ‘Dying Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well.’ By describing dying as an art, she includes a spectator to both her deaths and resurrections. Because the death is a performance, it necessarily requires others. In large part, she kills herself to punish them for driving her to it. The eager “peanut crunching crowd” is invited but criticized for their gratification. The crowd could certainly be understood to include the reader himself, since he reads the poem to explore her dark impulses. The crowd views Lady Lazarus as an object, and therefore does not recognize her as a human being. It is also reflected through multiple references to body parts separated from the whole.

From this interpretation, Lady Lazarus’s suicide then becomes “an assertion of wholeness, an act of self-definition, and a last desperate act of contempt toward the peanut-crunching crowd”. The only way she can keep herself intact is to destroy herself, and she does this rather than be turned into commodities. Though “Herr Doctor” will examine her remains for commodities, she will not have been defeated because of her final act. It shows how men treat women and the feeling of anger and frustration in a woman when looked as an insignificant object.

For a very long time, women have been seen as somewhat insignificant and object of flesh and bone rather than a soul that needs to be treated with respect. Times are changing and people are realizing and speaking out for gender equality more nowadays than they used to. This is a good sign that we are on the dawn of a new era where men and women are treated equally as opposed to a time where this was a society dominated by the male figure. Even though this poem has a very dark theme to it, but there are certain instance where the persona shows some positive signs, such as hope and will power. The 7th stanza with the lines ‘And I a smiling woman. I am only thirty’ shows that the persona has not given up even though she is being continuously oppressed. It shows us that she has the will power to push through all these hardships even if it meant that she has to go through the same cycle again and again.

Another line which clearly shows the will power and persistence of the persona is in the last stanza which goes like this: Out of the ash I rise with my red hair And I eat men like air. This shows that no matter how much hardships she endures, how much she is oppressed, she will keep fighting till the end. The poem finishes off with a bit of a positive touch even though the tone is aggressive and bordering violence. Overall, this was a very thought provoking poem which will leave you wondering all the things that you’ve done, be it as a male or female and your part in regulating or inhibiting gender biasness and oppression.

                                                           MARKS 5

1. What are some major themes in the poem?

Death, depression, pain, and power are the major themes of this poem. The disheartened speaker talks about her failed suicide attempts and give reasons for her resentment. She also expresses her anger for those who saved her from dying. Despite every effort to die she still survived. She continuously states the idea that she is being used as an object of entertainment. She regrets that her actions are watched as an act of amusement, rather than empathy. Moreover, the people, with their fake sympathies, are contributing more in her pain, and they are not allowing her to be free.

2. Explain : I have done it again.

Do I terrify?

Sylvia Plath is known for her tortured soul. This is what makes her intriguing to readers. Most people have experienced agony at least once. This agony is often so deep, there are no words to express the true anguish present. Plath, however, has a way of putting delicate, beautiful words to dark, lonely feelings. The first stanza of Lady Lazarus cannot be properly understood until the entire poem has been read. At first glance, this doesn’t have much meaning, but after reading the entirety of Lady Lazarus, readers can gather that Plath is referring to suicide. She admits right off the bat that she has tried to die once every decade of her life.

Plath then begins to explain to readers why she has tried to die so many times. She uses vivid imagery to compare her own suffering to that of the Jewish people. She compares her skin to a Nazi lampshade. This is significant because of the idea that the Nazi people used the skin of the Jews to make lampshades. Plath uses this horrifying metaphor to compare her own suffering to those in Nazi concentration camps. She conveys the heaviness of her pain by comparing her right foot to a paperweight. This imagery helps the reader to understand that Plath’s pain was so real that it felt like a physical weight. The paperweight conveys the nature of her emotional pain. The imagery of a featureless face reveals that she doesn’t feel any identity. She doesn’t feel set apart for any specific or important purpose. She feels like a face lost in the crowd, one that no one would remember.

3. Discuss some literary devices used in the poem Lady Lazarus.

Literary devices are tools used by writers to express their emotions, ideas, and themes and to make the text appealing to the readers. Sylvia Plath has also employed some literary devices in this poem to narrate her failed suicide attempts. The analysis of some of the literary devices used in this poem has been given below.

Simile: It is a device used to compare something with something else to make the meanings clear to the readers. For example, “And like the cat I have nine times to die”. Here the poet compares herself with a cat who can survive a tragic fall.

Anaphora: It refers to the repetition of a word or expression in the first part of some verses. For example, ‘So’ is repeated in the twenty second stanza of the poem to emphasize the point. “Or a piece of my hair or my clothes. / So, so, Herr Doktor. / So, Herr Enemy.”

Enjambment: It is defined as a thought or clause that does not come to an end at a line break; instead, it moves over the next line. For example, “The second time I meant / To last it out and not come back at all.”

Hyperbole: Hyperbole is a device used to exaggerate any statement for the sake of emphasis. For example, “To annihilate each decade” is hyperbole and no one can destroy or erase time.

Metaphor: It is a figure of speech in which an implied comparison is made between the objects that are different in nature. For example, “A sort of walking miracle, my skin; Bright as a Nazi lampshade.” Here she compares her suffering to prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps.

Assonance: Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds in the same line such as the sound of /a/ in “And there is a charge, a very large charge.”

Imagery: Imagery is used to make readers perceive things involving their five senses. For example, “The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth”, “To the same place, the same face, the same brute” and “Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.”

4. Explain :

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?

I am only thirty.

And like the cat I have nine times to die.

In stanzas 5-7 of Lady Lazarus, Plath describes her face as a fine Jew linen. Jew linens were used to wrap the body of Lazarus before they laid him in the tomb. Jew linens were also used to wrap Jesus’ body before he was laid in the tomb. Plath’s reference to the fine Jew linen reaffirms that she already feels dead. Or rather, she feels nothing just as the dead feel nothing. And this inability to feel is precisely what causes her to suffer. Plath continues to use imagery of death to reveal her deepest feelings. When she asks the reader to “peel off the napkin” she is challenging the reader to look at her for who she really is. She doesn’t believe that anyone would want to really know her, to peer into her soul and really know her. She believes that if people were to do that, they would be terrified. The reason she thinks this way is because she is afraid that people will become aware that although she is alive in flesh, her soul is dead. This is why she continues to use imagery of death and decomposition to describe herself.

This is the point in Lady Lazarus at which the reader can become aware that Plath identifies not with the risen Lazarus, but with the Lazarus who is dead and has already begun the decomposition process. This is why she describes herself as having a prominent nose cavity, eye pits, and teeth. Those features would be most prominent in a decaying body. Plath explains that the sour breath, the putrid smell of death, will soon vanish. She continues to explain the effect of death. Plath uses this imagery to explain the emptiness and numbness that tortured her soul. She uses the description of physical decomposition to convey the way she feels that her soul is decomposing. Plath then transitions from speaking of herself as an already dead woman, to revealing that she is actually alive. However, the tone of Lady Lazarus reveals that she is disappointed at being alive. It becomes obvious that she identifies with death far more than with life. She thinks of herself as a rotting corpse, not the “smiling woman” of only thirty that she sees when she looks in the mirror. She reveals an obvious disappointment that she has not been able to die when she compares herself to a cat, concluding that it will probably take many more attempts to reach death.

5. Which poetic devices have been used by Plath in this poem? Poetic and literary devices are the same, but a few are used only in poetry. Here is the analysis of some of the poetic devices used in this poem.

Stanza: A stanza is a poetic form of some verses and lines. There are twentyeight three-lined stanzas in this poem.

Tercet: A tercet is a three-lined stanza borrowed from Hebrew poetry. All the stanzas in the poem is a tercet.

End Rhyme: End rhyme is used to make the stanza melodious. For example, “hair/air”, “burn/concern” and “out/shout.”

6. Comment on the Lazarus metaphor used in the poem.

The major metaphors in this poem are complex due to their elaboration and extension. In many metaphorical constructions, the Lazarus metaphor is combined with the Holocaust metaphor. One of the novel metaphors that are based on the conventional conceptual religious metaphor is of Lazarus and his resurrection. Thus the source domain is religion and culture specific, activating the reader’s schema of resurrection and redemption. The persona begins by stating her failed attempted suicides. A visual image is drawn where the persona describes her present state after being saved from death: “A sort of walking miracle… / …Jew linen” (244). The persona is “a sort of walking miracle” which implies that her being alive and walking is almost unbelievable (my emphasis). The persona describes her skin is as bright as “a Nazi lampshade” (244). Her right foot is like a paperweight. Plath treats the persona’s face and foot as separate entities and compares them to objects. The foot is a paperweight, while her face is “a featureless, fine / Jew linen” (244).

The references to the Nazi-like brightness and the featurelessness of the Jew.

at once bring to the mind the Nazi concentration camps where Jews were incarcerated. Plath has thus associated the Jewish Lazarus with the Jews who were incarcerated in the concentration camps. Very skilfully, she extends this metaphor, which is discussed in detail in section 1.2.5 as the Holocaust metaphor. The Lazarus metaphor of the resurrection is extended as the shroud is uncovered: “Peel off the napkin/…enemy” (244). Her survival is supposed to terrify the Nazi victimiser: “The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth? / …Will vanish in a day” (244). The highly original linguistic image metaphor of a skull comes to mind with the use of the term “eye pits” in the first line. The synaesthetic metaphor transferring the taste of sourness to the smell of the breath is used.

The image of peeling off the napkin and discovering a face maps onto the image of lifting the shroud from a dead body. The stanzas describe the skeleton’s coming back to life, drawing from the Lazarus story and appropriate to the title of the poem. The grave is personified and attributed the capability of eating: “Soon, soon the flesh / …At home on me” (244). Another conventional metaphor of THE BODY AS A ‘HOME’ TO THE SOUL is constructed linguistically in a refreshing way. The flesh will again be a home to the life that enters the body. The persona will then emerge, alive and smiling: “And I a smiling woman. / …And like the cat I have nine times to die” (244). The reference to the cat dying nine times alludes to folk tales, where cats are believed to be tough survivors. The implication here is that the persona escapes death though she means to die. The line “I am only thirty” perhaps echo the words of visitors who console her that her wounds will heal faster due to the advantage of youth (244).

7. Explain : My knees. These are my hands

I rocked shut

As a seashell.

This is when she realizes that she is alive, though she wishes she were still in the tomb. This gives the reader the imagery of Plath looking at her hands, her knees, her flesh, and realizing the she is still alive, at least physically. She realizes that she is just the same as she was before experiencing death. She writes, ‘Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman. / The first time it happened I was ten. / It was an accident.’ Explaining that she is the same woman she was before her near death experience.

Plath then begins to give the reader some history on her experiences with death, explaining that the first time was an accident, and she was only ten years old. This is when it becomes clear that the first accidental near death experience was traumatizing to Plath, but somehow left her wanting another taste of death. Plath does not reveal the age of her second encounter with her own death, which was her

first suicide attempt. However, since she says she has tried once every decade, we can assume she was around 20 years old. She explains this experience, ‘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. This section of Lady Lazarus reveals that Plath came so close to death, that she believed she had actually experienced death. She also “meant to last it out” which reveals that she truly does not wish to live any longer.

8. What do you know about the Lazarus myth? What about the Phoenix?

At the end of the poem, Plath finally finds relief for herself by avenging her father, her husband and the male population as a whole. After her suicide she “melts into shriek/I turn and burn… [turning into] ash, ash”. She cautions her enemies to “beware, beware”. The poem’s title foretells the ending of the poem in its biblical reference. Jesus had resurrected Lazarus in the New Testament, Gospel of John. He restores Lazarus to life after being proclaimed dead for four days. Like Lazarus, Plath rises “out of the ash”. Here, the female counterpart of Lazarus is introduced. And she can also “eat men like air”. This is to imply that like smoke, she can grasp at anything and everything. This is a revelation of her new found power. Thus, Sylvia Plath has been symbolized as rebirth and revenge. She brings out her utter ferocity towards the male oppression that she has been faced with in her previous life.

Plath brings in the phoenix myth of resurrection. The image is created of a woman who has become a pure spirit rising against those who have confined her and bottled up her creativity and activity: gods, doctor, men, and Nazis. This metamorphosis of the self into spirit, after an ordeal of mutilation, torture, and immolation, makes the poem a hallmark of the dramatization of the basic initiatory process. Plath herself says: The speaker is a woman who has the great and terrible gift of being reborn. The only trouble is, she has to die first. She is the phoenix, the libertarian spirit, what you will. She is also just a good, plain, resourceful woman.

9. Explain :

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge For the hearing of my heart

I rise with my red hair And I eat men like air.

For the first time in Lady Lazarus, Plath makes her readers aware of the source of her suffering. She writes, ‘So, so, Herr Doktor. / So, Herr Enemy.’ Herr is the german word for Mr. The use of the German word “Doktor” refers to the Nazi doctors who brought the Jewish victims back to health, only to resume their suffering. By putting an emphasis on the word “Herr” twice in this stanza, Plath reveals that men the enemy and the cause of her suffering. Plath then begins to explain why men

are the enemy when she writes, ‘I am your opus, / I am your valuable, / The pure gold baby / That melts to a shriek.’

This reveals her belief that she is valuable to men only as an object, beautiful, but hard and lifeless. She does not deny that she is valuable to some people, particularly men, but only as a cold, hard object of beauty, not as a human being. She feels that her death, to the people around her, would be nothing more than watching a beautiful piece of jewellery burn. She uses heavy sarcasm when she says, “do not think I underestimate your great concern”. She feels that her death, to the people around her, would be nothing more than watching a beautiful piece of jewelry burn. Plath continues to imply that the people in her life, particularly men, value her only as an object. The Nazi’s were known to use the remains of the burned Jewish bodies to make soap. They also rummaged around heaps of human ashes to find jewelry and gold fillings. This is how Plath views her value to other people.

In the next stanza of Lady Lazarus, Plath turns to a tone of revenge. She continues to blame men, God, and the Devil, specifically pointing out that both God and Lucifer (the Devil) are men. This also reveals that she feels powerless under men. She refers to the Doktor, God, and the Devil all as men who hold some kind of power over her. It is difficult to tell whether Plath is referring to herself when she “rises from the ashes” as a physically alive woman who has failed yet again at trying to end her life, or as one who has died and will return as an immortal. She may plan to stop attempting suicide and take her revenge on men instead of herself. Or she plans to come back as an immortal after she has died to take her revenge on men. The red hair suggests that it could symbolize the mythical creature, phoenix, who can burst into flames and then be reborn from its ashes. Either way, Plath warns men everywhere, that she is no longer a powerless victim under them, but that she is ready to take her revenge.

10. Why did Sylvia Plath write the poem of “Lady Lazarus”?

Poetry is confession, catharsis, therapy, a way of making sense of the world, a chance to have one’s words immortalized, and puzzle-making: putting the perfect words in the perfect order. Namely, the poem is her most mature attempt to make sense of her mental illness (which lead to previous unsuccessful suicide attempts), her family (father and mother), her ex-husband, and the cruelty, dehumanization, and absurdity of the modern world. Plath attempts to be an absurdist and confessional poet in “Lady Lazarus,” her magnum opus along with “Daddy.” Anne Stevenson lauds the paradoxical complexity of Plath’s poetry, saying it “is all of a piece”: “Its moments of tenderness work upon the heart as surely as its moments of terror and harsh resentment. And despite her exaggerated tone and the extreme violence of some of her energy, Plath did, courageously, open a door to reality.”

Stevenson goes on to praise Plath’s “Lady Lazarus” persona “with its aggressive assertion of regeneration, rejoice[ing] in so much verbal energy that the justice or

injustice of the poet’s accusations cease to matter.” The poem does not condone suicide. Rather, it rises above it, if only for a moment. Her poetry works best in barrage: imagery against men, materialism, sexism, self, suffering, and tradition. Regardless of the poet, the poem, like all good art, affirms and breathes life.

11. Who is the ‘I’ speaker here? What is his/her significance?

The I-speaker, whose language is the brittle, acidly comic language of a female stand-up comedian who presents her act to the public: 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. The ‘peanut-crunching crowd’ that shoves in to see her resurrection wants a show but she tells them that this time they will have to pay ‘a very large charge’ for it. She is ‘only thirty’ and ‘like the cat I have nine times to die’, but this is her third resurrection: 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. In the first lines of the poem, the I-speaker boasts about her ability to keep coming back: I have done it again. One year in every ten I manage it – But she has come back once again into the world of male savagery. Her impresario is a Nazi: So, so, Herr Doktor. So, Herr Enemy. I am your opus, I am your valuable. She describes herself in terms of a concentration camp victim of that monstrous figure – ‘my skin / bright as a Nazi lampshade’, ‘my face a featureless, fine / Jew linen’. Burned to ashes, flesh and bone dissolve. All that is left are the objects that would not burn, like the gold filling or wedding ring and the cake of soap, made with melted body fat.

But despite this horrific image of her destruction, Lady Lazarus is not finished yet. She has come back before and will come back again. The last lines of the poem are a warning to all men and to the system of male values that sets even a male god above all. God and Lucifer are both addressed as ‘Herr’, in a deliberate attempt to emphasise their common male-ness: Herr God, Herr Lucifer Beware Beware. Out of the ash I rise with my red hair And I eat men like air. Introducing this poem for BBC radio, Sylvia Plath said: The speaker is a woman who has the great and terrible gift of being reborn. The only trouble is, she has to die first. She is the Phoenix, the libertarian spirit, what you will. She is also just a good, plain resourceful woman. Lady Lazarus is a survivor, a woman who understands the nature of her enemy and returns to fight back. The anger of the fighting back poems is directed against men who wrong women and against the world which stands by and allows them to do it.

12. How does Plath incorporate the metaphor of ‘Life is a Play’ in her poem ‘Lady Lazarus’?

Plath has skilfully elaborated on the Lazarus metaphor and simultaneously also introduced another metaphor, based on the conventional conceptual metaphor, LIFE IS A PLAY. The persona describes how she feels after having survived. Being saved by the doctors, and in hospital, she resents the presence of others watching her. In

Line 26-Line 33, the persona describes the survival and the visitors as: “The peanut crunching crowd / … I may be skin and bone”. The words “skin and bone” seem to echo the reactions of the onlookers in the hospital; as visitors would usually show their surprise over the deterioration in her health and then would go on to add to their wishes for her recovery. Lazarus metaphor is extended as the words “them unwrap me hand and foot” can be mapped onto uncovering Lazarus’s shroud. Lying in the hospital, after being saved by doctors, in the literal sense, it is the doctors removing her bandages. The correspondences from this conventional conceptual metaphor can be clearly mapped onto the poetic metaphor.

1 The persona’s survival, her resurrection as Lady Lazarus, is compared to a performer’s return to the stage. Thus, the roles are reversed. In this metaphor the persona is no longer Lady Lazarus, instead she is a strip-tease performer. This metaphor implies that unlike Lazarus, the persona did not want to come back to life. The persona is a performer on stage; the visitors to the hospital are now compared to the audience. However, here the performance is made more specific; it is a strip tease night show. The visitors at the hospital are now compared to people crunching peanuts and watching the stripping of the persona on stage. She resents being exposed to the crowd who watch her. In this novel metaphor, the persona fits the role of a strip tease on the stage. The persona sarcastically brings out the irony and bitterness of being a woman in a male world. The next two stanzas go on to describe the experience of surviving the suicide: Comeback in broad day To the same place, the same face, the same brute Amused shout: ‘A miracle!’ … Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.

The normal reactions of those eagerly awaiting her recovery seem to irritate her. The words “amused shouts” express pleasure through entertainment rather than expressing the relief and joy her visitors at the hospital would feel over seeing her alive. The word associates and coheres with the metaphor of theatrical performance and spectators. The persona then sarcastically demands a charge from those who watch her, implying that she is a performer to be highly paid for such a dramatic performance.

                                                          MARKS 2

1. Who wrote the poem ‘Lady Lazarus?

Sylvia Plath.

2. What is Sylvia Plath best known for?

Sylvia Plath was an American poet best known for her novel ‘The Bell Jar,’ and for her poetry collections ‘The Colossus’ and ‘Ariel.’

3. What was the pseudonym of Sylvia Plath?

Victoria Lucas.

4. When and where was the poem originally published?

“Lady Lazarus” is a poem written by Sylvia Plath, originally included in Ariel. which was published in 1965, two years after her death by suicide.

5. What is the poem about?

“Lady Lazarus” is a poem commonly understood to be about suicide. 6. On which event is the poem based?

The poem ‘Lady Lazarus’ is based on World War II.

7. To which group of poems of Plath does the poem belong?

The poem ‘Lady Lazarus’ is known as one of Plath’s Holocaust Poems.

8. Who is the narrator here?

It is narrated by a woman, and mostly addressed to an unspecified person.

9. What is the central idea of the poem?

The central idea of the poem is oppression.

10. What does the speaker transform to in the end?

At the end of the poem, the speaker gets transformed to a mythical bird called Phoenix.

11. What is the tone of the poem?

Lady Lazarus has a single speaker with different personas, so as the poem progresses perspective changes. Overall the tone is defiant, perverse and grotesque. There is a hint of theatrical bravado and even comedy.

12. When did the author record the poem and where?

The author recorded the poem for BBC in 1962.

13. Which character from the Bible was depicted in the poem?

The Biblian figure Lazarus.

14. Who is Lazarus?

In the Bible, Lazarus was a person who was brought back to life by Jesus. Jesus is said to have wept when he heard Lazarus died because he loved him, and he loved his family and saw their grief.

15. What is the significance of the allusion to ‘Lady Lazarus’?

Lazarus was a man who was resurrected by Jesus. So when we first see the title Lady Lazarus, what comes to my mind is that, this poem is a feminist approach to resurrection and it is a biblical allusion. Because she calls herself “a sort of walking miracle”, the title seems apt.

16. What es Herr God mean?

Herr m (plural Herre) Mr., mister, sir. gentleman. master, lord, generally denotes that somebody has control over something, either in a generic or in a regal sense. Lord, God.

17. How many lines does Lady Lazarus have?

It’s written in short, three-line stanzas (also known as tercets) with super-short lines. The poem is quick, clipped, brusque. There’s not a lot of lingering over words. Lady Lazarus isn’t into long drawn out lines or sentences.

18. Why is this monologue so popular?

‘Lady Lazarus’ is a bitter dramatic monologue, famous for the themes of death and oppression. It was published in 1965, two years after her death by suicide. The poem gives hints to multiple suicide attempts of the tormented speaker. It also highlights the role of power and oppression in one’s life.

19. In several poems, including ‘Lady Lazarus’ and ‘Daddy’, Plath used the ‘Holocaust’ as a metaphor. Why?

This is to symbolize oppression. When Plath refers to someone else as a ‘Nazi’, she usually signifies herself as being a Jew, thus suggesting that she feels heavily oppressed by them. Although provoking controversy was probably not a primary aim, it certainly did so. Also, Plath’s family weren’t Jewish; they were Unitarian.

20. How does Plath view death in “Lady Lazarus”?

She views death as something she has conquered.

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