Lady Lazarus Summary, Analysis, Explanation
An Introductory Note :[Lady Lazarus Summary, Analysis, Explanation]
“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. This poem is commonly used as an example of her writing style. 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 thoughts.
Substance :
The poem is spoken by Lady Lazarus, a speaker who shares a lot of similarities with the poet herself. Lady Lazarus begins by telling us that she has done “it” again.
What is this “it”? We don’t know at first. She compares herself to a Holocaust victim, and tell us that’s she’s only thirty years old, and that she has nine lives, like a cat. We soon figure out that “it” is dying; but, like the cat, she keeps returning to life. She tells us about the first two times that she almost died, and tells us that dying “is an art.”
She says that dying is a theatrical event, and imagines that people come and see her do it. In fact, it starts to seem as if she’s performing a third death in front of a crowd at a circus or carnival. She compares herself again to Holocaust victims, and imagines that she’s been burned to death in a concentration camp crematorium. At the end of the poem, she resurrects (or returns to life from death) once again, and she “eat[s] men like air.”
An Analytical Summary :
I. The narrator begins by saying she has “done it again.” Every ten years, she manages to commit this unnamed act. She considers herself a walking miracle with bright skin, her right foot a “paperweight,” and her face as fine and featureless as a “Jew linen”.
II. She addresses an unspecified enemy, asking him to peel the napkin from her face, and inquiring whether he is terrified by the features he sees there. She assures him that her “sour breath” will vanish in a day.
III. She is certain that her flesh will soon be restored to her face after having been sacrificed to the grave, and that she will then be a smiling, 30 year-old woman. She will ultimately be able to die nine times, like a cat, and has just completed her third death. She will die once each decade.
IV. After each death, a “peanut-crunching crowd” shoves in to see her body unwrapped. She addresses the crowd directly, showing them she remains skin and bone, unchanged from who she was before.
V. The first death occurred when she was ten, accidentally. The second death was intentional – she did not mean to return from it. Instead, she was as “shut as a seashell” until she was called back by people who then picked the worms off her corpse. She does not specifically identify how either death occurred.
VI. She believes that “Dying / Is an art, like everything else,” and that she does it very well. Each time, “it feels real,” and is easy for her. What is difficult is the dramatic comeback, the return to the same place and body, occurring as it does in broad daylight before a crowd’s cry of “A miracle!”
VII. She believes people should pay to view her scars, hear her heart, or receive a word, touch, blood, hair or clothes from her.
VIII. In the final stanzas, she addresses the listener as “Herr Dockter” and “Herr Enemy,” sneering that she is his crowning achievement, a “pure gold baby.”
IX. She does not underestimate his concern, but is bothered by how he picks through her ashes. She insists there is nothing there but soap, a wedding ring, and a gold filling. 1
X. She warns “Herr God, Herr Lucifer” to beware of her because she is going to rise out of the ash and “eat men like air.”
Paraphrase:
I have done it again. Once every ten years, I manage to kill myself and come back to life. I am a kind of living miracle, with my skin so white it looks like a lampshade the Nazis made from the skin of dead Jewish Holocaust victims, my right foot heavy like a paperweight, and my face, without its usual features, looking like a fine piece of Jewish cloth. Peel off the cloth, you, my enemy.
Do I scare you, without my nose, with my empty eye sockets, and a full set of teeth like a skull? The sour smell of decay on my breath will disappear in a day. Soon, very soon, the skin that decayed in my tomb will be back on my body, and I will become a smiling woman again. I am only thirty-years-old. And like a cat, I also have nine times to die. I am currently dead, and this is the third time out of nine. What a shame, to destroy each decade like this. See the million flashing bulbs.
The crowd, crunching on peanuts, shoves in to watch as my burial cloth is unwrapped from me, like some kind of striptease. Gentlemen and ladies of the crowd, here are my hands. My knees. I may be nothing more than skin and bones, but regardless, I came back as the same identical woman I was before I died. The first time I died, I was ten-years-old. It was an accident. The second time I died was intentional. I meant for it to last, and to never come back. I rocked into a ball, shutting myself off to the world like a seashell.
People had to call and call for me to come back to life, and had to pick off the worms, which had already begun to infest my dying body, as though they were pearls that were stuck to me. Like everything else, dying is an art-form, a skill. I’m extremely good at it. I try to die so it feels terrible, like I’m in hell. I try to die in a way that feels as though I’m actually dying. I guess you could say that dying is my calling (since I’m so good at it). It’s easy enough to die in a cell (like in a mental hospital or prison. It’s easy enough to die and stay in one place.
It’s the dramatic resurrection, the return in the middle of the day to the same place, the return to the same body, the return to the same old loud and surprised shout: ‘It’s a miracle!’ that really tires me out. I charge for people to look at my scars, and I charge for them to listen to my heart-it beats fast and continuously. And there is a charge, a very expensive charge, for people to hear me speak, or to touch me, or to buy some of my blood, or hair, or clothes. So, Sir Doctor.
So Sir Enemy, I am your great artistic work. I am your valuable item, like a baby made out of pure gold that, when dying, melts until there is nothing but the sound of screaming. I turn away from you, and burn alive. Don’t think I underestimate just don’t know how concerned you are for me. Now I’m just ash, all ash-you poke at the ash, stir it around, looking for my flesh, or bone, but there isn’t anything left- just a bar of soap, a wedding ring, a gold tooth filling. Sir God, Sir Lucifer, beware, beware. Out of the ashes, I will rise, my hair red (like a phoenix’s feathers), and I will eat men like they are nothing, like I am simply breathing.
The poem which remains one of Plath’s most enduring works. “Lady Lazarus,” is both the title of the poem, and its speaker-much like the biblical Lazarus, the man Jesus resurrected from the dead i the Gospel of John, the speaker is also resurrected by external forces, and more than once. This resurrection, however, is unwanted-the speaker reveals she wants to die in order to escape the profound suffering caused by living in an oppressive, male dominated society. Instead, the speaker is forced to come back to life, each revival a carnival-like performance for a “peanut-crunching crowd.”
However, the speaker warns her enemies-the men who bring her back to life-eventually she will return and “eat men like air,” demonstrating a complicated dynamic of empowerment and hopelessness. Using metaphors of death and resurrection, Plath provides a dark insight into the suicidal mind, as well as a critique of society’s twisted fascination with suffering, and of the horror of a being a woman in a patriarchal world.
Background:
“Lady Lazarus,” a poem that Plath wrote in 1962 not long before her death, is one of the most amazingly tortured and beautiful and powerful poems of all time (really, we are not exaggerating), and it comes directly out of Plath’s angst. Unfortunately, because Plath’s life was so interesting and tragic, people have the tendency to let her biography (more specifically, her suicide) overshadow her work. Though this is understandable-“Lady Lazarus” is a poem about suicide and resurrection, after all-it would be a huge mistake to ignore Plath’s actual poetry.
Plath’s legacy endures because her poems are awesome, tragic, completely bizarre, perverse, and heartbreaking all on their own and all at the same time. Plath had been fed up with male ignorance and irresponsibility. Within the month following the separation, depressed, living lonely in Devon with only her children, Plath wrote her October poems which consist of “Lady Lazarus,” “Daddy,” “Fever 103,” “Purdah,” “Poppies in July,” “Ariel,” and others. She rose every day at dawn throughout october and November of 1962 to take down her poetry. The forty poems of rage, despair, love, and vengeance that have brought her fame. She submitted these poems to various magazines at the time, but only the New Yorker magazine was interested in a few lines.
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lady lazarus summary
lady lazarus summary
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