‘Lady Lazarus’ by Sylvia Plath: a commentary

I know that this poem has been done to death, but it’s my favourite and I really wanted to get my thoughts about it on paper. And I referenced it in my post about Mary Ventura a couple of days ago. NB: this is a fairly hastily written commentary, and I will probably revisit it soon with fresher (and less tired) eyes. There is also nothing here that probably hasn’t been said by someone else before, but maybe it will be helpful for some A Level students or people who have never picked up Plath’s poetry before…

Apologies for the massive line breaks between the lines of poetry. I tried for ages to format this properly, but WordPress is rubbish!

Background

Sylvia Plath wrote Lady Lazarus in late 1962, months before her suicide in February 1963. At this point, she was a single mother – she and Hughes had split that year, following his affair with Assia Wevill – raising her two young children, Nicholas and Frieda. Lady Lazarus is a bitter, scathing dramatic monologue about death and rebirth, survival and revenge. 

The title of the poem alludes to the Biblical figure Lazarus, who was resurrected by Jesus after death. Here, the Lazarus figure is Plath: nine years earlier, she had overdosed on sleeping pills in her mother’s cellar. In June 1962, she had deliberately driven her car into a river in another attempt to end her life. And, as a 10-year-old girl, she almost drowned in a swimming accident. These brushes with death form the basis of Lady Lazarus. Is it worth noting, though, that Plath often played with different personas in her poems, and it is reductive to assume that the speaker is simply a mouthpiece for Plath’s own feelings.

When recording the poem for the BBC in 1962, 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, very resourceful woman.”

Plath also seems to be alluding to the parallels between herself and the speaker in the poem, who is simultaneously an ordinary woman and a symbol of liberation and rebirth; this rebirth is both a blessing and a curse, and must always be preceded by the agony of death.

Commentary

I have done it again.   

One year in every ten   

I manage it——

The poem opens with a confession. We do not know what ‘it’ is at this stage: is a suicide attempt something taboo and unspeakable, or something so disturbingly commonplace and trivial that it is not worth mentioning explicitly? ‘One year in every ten’ closely mirrors Plath’s life (swimming accident at 10; overdose at 21; car crash at 30, although the latter isn’t alluded to in the poem). She also imagines a future attempt. A year later, at 31, Plath would successfully kill herself. The long dash at the end of this first stanza creates an uncomfortable space and silence as Plath leaves her ‘confession’ hanging in the air. But there is a playful, performative tone at work here, and a genuine sense of triumph or rueful self-reproach. This creates an ambiguity that the reader will have to navigate: how are they supposed to feel? We are reading about a series of awful, intimate moments; we are invited to witness somebody’s personal tragedy.

A sort of walking miracle, my skin   

Bright as a Nazi lampshade,   

My right foot

 

A paperweight,

My face a featureless, fine   

Jew linen.

Plath’s use of Holocaust imagery to convey her own sense of personal hell has sparked controversy for decades; but, regardless of how we feel about it morally, we cannot deny that the imagery is visceral and shocking. ‘Miracle’ is contrasted sharply with the ‘Nazi lampshade’ skin and the ‘Jew linen’ of her face. For Plath, the psychological pain of her mental suffering is akin to that of concentration camp victims. Plath also had a German father, who died when she was a child; the Nazi imagery may also be a result of her fascination with him, and her conflicted feelings towards him. In Sylvia Plath: The Poetry of Initiation, Jon Rosenblatt argues that Plath’s Nazi imagery “shows how a contemporary consciousness is obsessed with historical and personal demons and how that consciousness deals with these figures…the holocaust serves her as a metaphor for the death-and-life battle between the self and a deadly enemy”, which I think is the most eloquent and concise interpretation.

Notice the stanza break – ‘My right foot / A paperweight’ – mirroring the crushing heaviness of the metaphor. Rebirth is associated with rising up, weightlessness, air; for Lady Lazarus, it is like a burden anchoring her to the ground. The identification with mundane objects, the paperweight and linen, implies entrapment in an existence designed to please or be of use to others.

Peel off the napkin   

O my enemy.   

Do I terrify?——

 

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

The sour breath

Will vanish in a day.

 

Soon, soon the flesh

The grave cave ate will be   

At home on me

 

And I a smiling woman. 

The unnamed ‘enemy’ is the first reference to another person. From reading the rest of the poem we can infer that it is an anonymous male antagonist, but the enemy could also be us. Lady Lazarus is preoccupied with the public vs the private, speculation vs intimacy; Plath’s 1953 overdose was all over the newspapers, and the search was conducted very publicly. This poem forces us to examine the nature of our uncomfortable fascination with other people’s trauma: ‘Do I terrify?’ she asks us accusingly. The ‘napkin’ is presumably a reference to skin, and reminds us of the way in which we as spectators consume this kind of tragedy. The skull imagery evokes the speaker’s outer self being publicly stripped away, to reveal the ‘true’ self that ‘terrif[ies]’. The ‘grave cave’ could be a reference to Lazarus’s body left in a cave to decompose, and also to the cellar in which Plath hid after her overdose. The monosyllabic assonance of ‘grave cave ate’ is theatrically sombre and deathly.

I am only thirty.

And like the cat I have nine times to die.

 

This is Number Three.   

What a trash

To annihilate each decade.

Plath excels at black humour, and the incongruous reference to feline folklore is simultaneously amusing and jarring at this stage in the poem. There is a sense of invincibility here, at attempt ‘Number Three’. Yet the decennial rebirths seem anything but positive: they are a ‘trash’, an ‘annihilat[ion]’, a destruction of years of her life. Like her stripped-back body, the speaker’s life is depicted as an emotional wasteland.

What a million filaments.   

The peanut-crunching crowd   

Shoves in to see

 

Them unwrap me hand and foot——

The big strip tease.   

Gentlemen, ladies

 

These are my hands   

My knees.

I may be skin and bone,

 

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.

Mark Ford summarised this part of the poem better than I could, so I will quote him: Here Plath “deploys the language of advertising, mass spectacle and pornographic self-display – the ‘big strip tease’ that the ‘peanut-crunching crowd / Shoves in to see’. The poem figures the nameless, faceless crowd’s fascinated eyeing of her body parts and fingering of her blood as part of a debased, commercialised martyrdom”. A suicide attempt becomes a crowd-pleasing ‘strip tease’ performed in front of ‘a million filaments’ (from cameras – a reference to the media interest generated by her overdose). The reader realises that they are part of the ‘peanut-crunching crowd’: are watching a poetic re-enactment of the suicide attempt, and poring over the gruesome descriptions of her body. The speaker is also complicit in the theatrical spectacle, but there is a sense of savage bitterness as she unwraps her body for us. At this point, she has become disparate body parts.

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. 

These are explicit references to the swimming accident and the sleeping pill overdose (notice that near-death is still ambiguously referred to as ‘it’). The ‘seashell’ simile contrasts starkly with the preceding ‘strip tease’, as we are reminded of the speaker’s vulnerability and desire to close herself off from the world. Having been under her mother’s house for three days, Plath most likely encountered creepy crawlies which had to be picked off her; but there is something uncomfortably sexual in the imagery of the ‘sticky pearls’ removed by the anonymous ‘they’.

Dying

Is an art, like everything else.   

I do it exceptionally well.

 

I do it so it feels like hell.   

I do it so it feels real.

I guess you could say I’ve a call. 

These two stanzas perfectly encapsulate the juxtaposition of self-mocking black humour and creeping horror that makes this poem so powerful. The former stanza nearly always gets a laugh when I read it aloud; the latter is met with silence. There is something masochistic in the speaker’s hellish suicide attempts, her determination for death to feel ‘real’, her sense that this is what she was made for. The anaphora ‘I do it…’ intensifies the brutal simplicity of the confession. Death, or attempted death, becomes a performance designed to entertain others, but there is serious agony behind it.

It’s easy enough to do it in a cell.

It’s easy enough to do it and stay put.   

It’s the theatrical

 

Comeback in broad day

To the same place, the same face, the same brute   

Amused shout:

 

‘A miracle!’

That knocks me out.  

Again, we have the language of showbusiness (‘theatrical / Comeback’) and spectacle (the ‘brute’ amusement of the waiting crowd). Suicide becomes a kind of magic trick. But nothing changes with each rebirth: she is ‘the same, identical woman’; she comes back ‘to the same place, the same face…’. There is a feeling of futility here, but also perhaps a strange reassurance that everything is what it was before.

There is a charge

 

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge   

For the hearing of my heart——

It really goes.

 

And there is a charge, a very large charge   

For a word or a touch   

Or a bit of blood

 

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.   

The unwrapping of the speaker’s body becomes a commercial venture, reminiscent of the ‘big strip tease’ earlier in the poem – a kind of morbid prostitution. (Perhaps Plath was also correctly predicting the rush to buy up her possessions when they were auctioned off by her daughter in 2018, and the displaying of her hair in various exhibitions after her death.) Or perhaps the ‘charge’ is metaphorical: those she loves most, who are close to her, will pay the price of emotional pain?

So, so, Herr Doktor.   

So, Herr Enemy.

 

I am your opus,

I am your valuable,   

The pure gold baby

 

That melts to a shriek.   

I turn and burn.

Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

Here the speaker directly addresses the anonymous male antagonist again. ‘Doktor’ is obviously German for doctor, perhaps in this case an ‘Enemy’ doctor in a concentration camp who performs tortuous experiments on Jewish people. There is a vein of suffering and torture running through this poetic rebirth. Or perhaps Plath is attacking wider patriarchal structures, of which the man is a symbol. ‘Enemy’ casts the speaker as a kind of heroic figure, facing her adversary head-on. Are we the adversary? It certainly feels that way at times. Lady Lazarus is cast as an ‘opus’, a ‘valuable’, a ‘pure gold baby’ – a possession, or a specimen – but she eludes the ‘Enemy’ as she ‘melts to a shriek’. In agony, she can melt away to nothing. Phoenix-like (or possibly witch-like), she ‘burn[s]’, sarcastically noting the audience’s ‘great [fake] concern’.

Ash, ash—

You poke and stir.

Flesh, bone, there is nothing there——

 

A cake of soap,   

A wedding ring,   

A gold filling. 

Reduced to nothing – like the cremated victims of Nazi extermination camps – she no longer exists for the ‘peanut-crunching crowd’ or for ‘Herr Doktor’: only her belongings remain. This could also be an allusion to the Nazis’ stealing of Jewish victims’ valuables, and their use of human fat to make soap.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer   

Beware

Beware.

 

Out of the ash

I rise with my red hair   

And I eat men like air.

The doctor figure becomes a Biblical paradox: he is simultaneously God and Lucifer. But the speaker’s wrath is directed not just towards him, but also towards ‘men’ more generally. The final lines are a witch-like incantation: the sinister repetition of ‘beware’ rhymes with ‘hair’ and ‘air’, and the final stanza evokes phoenix-like imagery of rising from the ashes. This time, Lazy Lazarus is resurrected as a powerful, vengeful, fully-formed figure, reminiscent of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan. It is her turn to consume, instead of being consumed metaphorically by the crowd and literally by the flames. And yet she eats men ‘like air’: is it effortless? Does it mean that men are nothing? Or is it ultimately an empty, futile victory?