Sylvia Plath is renowned for her pioneering work in ‘confessional poetry.’ Her 28-stanza poem, “Lady Lazarus”, works through themes that will eventually appear again in her illustrious poem, “Daddy,” written in October 1962, just a few months before she succeeded in committing suicide. Both poems appeared in the posthumously published poetry collection, Ariel, released in 1965.
Confessional Poetry—Plath’s Multiple Suicide Attempts:
Confessional poetry is work that reveals unpleasant or embarrassing details about one’s own life. In this case, Plath writes about her multiple suicide attempts. The first stanza opens with the declaration, “I have done it again/one year in every ten/I manage it—. “ This reveals that Plath has attempted suicide once a decade.
In stanza eight, she indicates that “This is Number Three,” a reference to the fact that she has attempted to take her own life twice before. Stanza 12 discusses her first attempt, which happened when she was ten. She explains in the stanza’s final line, “It was an accident.”
In stanza 13, she declares that in the second attempt, presumably when she was 20, she meant it and hoped “not to come back at all.” Again, however, she was brought back, as she explains in the stanza’s last lines: “They had to call and call/and pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.”
Meaning of title, “Lady Lazarus”:
Chapter 11 of the Gospel of John tells of a miracle in which Jesus reanimates Lazarus after his death and following four days inside a tomb. Jesus has the Jewish mourners congregated around this tomb, roll the stone away. He says a prayer and calls out to Lazarus, who emerges at the tomb’s opening, still wearing his burial attire.
Plath, as the poem’s speaker, compares herself to Lazarus. Although she has attempted suicide several times, after the previous two tries, she has been brought back and has continued to live. She, therefore, considers herself a female version of Lazarus.
In stanzas 17 and 18, Plath makes direct reference to the biblical Lazarus story with the lines, “Comeback in broad day/To the same place, the same face, the same brute/Amused shout:/'A miracle!'/That knocks me out.” Here, too, she suggests an audience that is amazed by her resurrection.
Why the Repeated References to Nazis and Concentration Camps?
Although Plath herself was born in America, her father came from Grabow, Germany. Her mother hailed from Austria, but was of uncertain and perhaps untraceable genealogical descent. This knowledge apparently weighed heavily on Plath and perhaps even echoed her mother's own concerns, since during this period, families were encouraged (and eventually forced) to trace their family lineage to learn if they were truly “German” or whether so-called “undesirable racial elements” had entered their genealogical record.
In the poem “Daddy,” written just a few months before she succeeded in killing herself, Plath makes reference to her disapproving father’s role in “chuffing [her] off like a Jew.” This is an allusion to her uncertain ancestry, which, during her father’s era (and the era of her childhood), may have put her on a train to the concentration camps. In her own life, this inherent disapproval--from a man long dead--put her on a path towards deep and abiding depression. In “Daddy,” she also indicates that there was always a little gypsy in her. Gypsies, too, under the Third Reich were unwelcome and confined to concentration and death camps.
In stanza two, Plath makes the first, stunning mention of the word Nazi by writing, “A sort of walking miracle, my skin/Bright as a Nazi lampshade.” The lampshade refers to allegations that at Buchenwald, Nazi officials (particularly Commandant Karl Koch and his wife Ilse) had lampshades made out of prisoners’ skin. In 1945, filmmaker Billy Wilder made a movie about the recently liberated Buchenwald and featured images of shrunken heads, segments of skin, and an ordinary looking table lamp. Shortly thereafter, these elements became linked with Nazi atrocities in the popular imagination.
Other references to the fate of death camp prisoners appear in stanza 25, where she writes about her body’s incineration: “Ash, ash ---/You poke and stir./Flesh, bone, there is nothing there----“. She continues in stanza 26 with reference to elements either stolen from prisoners or which the remnants of prisoners were used to manufacture, “A cake of soap,/A wedding ring,/A gold filling.”
Conclusion: Malevolent Hopefulness
Plath’s poem ends with a kind of malevolent hopefulness. This hope seems to lie in her own ability to destroy. She characterizes herself as a man-eater, a kind of empowerment she likely needed to feel in light of her husband, the poet Ted Hughes’ philandering and the couple’s marital separation. She writes that both God and the devil should “beware.”And phoenix-like, she will rise from the ashes with her red hair (Plath’s was, incidentally, a kind of red-gold) and “eat men like air,” as if they were nothing at all. Plath paints herself as a destroyer, a vixen, who is all powerful and beyond omnipotent good and evil.
Savannah Schroll Guz - Savannah Schroll Guz holds a Master's Degree from the University of Pittsburgh. In 1997-1998, she was a Fulbright Scholar and worked as a ...
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