An Explication of "Lady Lazarus"

Brimming with intensely morbid imagery and a hauntingly poignant sense of self-depreciation and futility, the poetry of Sylvia Plath usually tends to evoke either praise or condemnation. However, the most raucous and powerful blows of Plath’s words do not lie within these reactions but instead within the murky aftertaste she leaves behind somehow. Many readers recoil from such poems as "Lady Lazarus," the miraculous chronicle of a woman who repeatedly commits suicide and comes back to life, feeling an obtuse internal emptiness while externally paralyzed by the inability to articulate why such feelings now possess them (Lowell 380). Perhaps, then, the true trial set forth by "Lady Lazarus" is not merely comprised of the overwhelming themes of suicide, self-destruction, and futility; rather, the familiarity of such darkness and the possibility of experiencing such concepts inside oneself create the raw wound Plath so brilliantly conveys with her literature.

While Sylvia Plath is notorious for uncommonly bold and violently dark imagery, the speaker in "Lady Lazarus" is merely reflecting the beasts with which she wrestles—certainly, she is no beast herself. In introducing a reading of "Lady Lazarus" for BBC radio, Plath urges us to consider that

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. (198)

With that in mind, the brutal "eyeing of scars" that the speaker effects in "Lady Lazarus" is even more chilling than if we thought of her as simply a maddened, savage being and not a very ordinary human being, perhaps one much like ourselves ("Lady Lazarus" 750).

From the very first stanza, the concept of chronic self-destruction and suicide is confessed as the speaker introduces us to her very dark pattern, a cycling of breaking down and coming back. Literary critic Pamela J. Annas suggests that Plath has constructed a "mythical, temporal schema into which she fit what she was as the significant events in her life. Thus she says in ‘Lady Lazarus’ of her suicide attempts, ‘One year in every ten / I manage it—‘" (410). With the second stanza, the speaker then delves not only into her own suffering, but a very universal sense of suffering as well. With the comparing of her complexion to "a Nazi lampshade," the allegory of the Jewish Holocaust and mass suffering begins ("Lady Lazarus" 749). In creating such an allegory, Plath shows that "when suffering is mass-produced ... and nothing remains— certainly no values, no humanity" and this "overwhelming anonymity of pain" which the speaker portrays is particularly potent (Alvarez 382). Chilled by this grim darkness underneath which the speaker’s spirit suffers, a jeering tone is effected in the fourth stanza as she accusingly and demandingly says, "Peel off the napkin / O my enemy" ("Lady Lazarus" 749). It is this sort of sardonic tone which sets the mood of "Lady Lazarus" to be so defiant in its brash expression of intolerable pain and self-deprecation.

Clearly, the subject of "Lady Lazarus" is the purification achieved by death (Alvarez 382). The speaker assures us that "the sour breath"—the spoils of an unhappy life, literally breathed out as a lamenting sigh—"will vanish in a day" and she will therefore be purified with this next measure of suicide ("Lady Lazarus" 749). She continues her self-disparaging and snide tone with bleak yet sardonic images of a "peanut-crunching crowd / [shoving] in to see / Them unwrap me," a sort of grim irony as she confesses her uncommon tendency to alternately destroy and resuscitate herself ("Lady Lazarus" 750).

Nevertheless, the speaker does maintain a sense of humor—albeit a very morbid one—in recounting her penchant for self-deprecation. Author Robert Diyanni notes that this darkly humorous characteristic is especially evident in her ironic understatement:

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. (519)

Yet despite the disturbing ease which with she details her ability to destroy herself, the speaker in "Lady Lazarus" enlightens her audience to the true horror of her miraculous life-and-death cycle. Death is not the problem, it’s being reborn; that is to say, while her destruction is accomplished with great facility, returning "To the same place, the same face, the same brute / Amused shout: / ‘A miracle!’" is what cripples the speaker, what "knocks [her] out" ("Lady Lazarus" 750).

Over the next several stanzas, the allegory of mass suffering and the speaker viewing herself as a Jew is continued until she pushes her somber story of suicide closer to climax. She warns, "Herr God, Herr Lucifer, / Beware / Beware" and demonstrates the strength that lies underneath all of her sorrow, the strength to survive such strife—literally, suicide—again and again ("Lady Lazarus" 751). Then, the poem "ends with a final, defensive, desperate assertion of omnipotence" as Alvarez comments (382). We are frighteningly informed by the speaker that:

It is on that icy note of omniscience that the reader leaves the poem and is forced to cope, alone, with one’s own chill of internal darkness.

Indeed, death and poetry were inseparable for Sylvia Plath as evidenced by both "Lady Lazarus" and her own suicide. As Alvarez comments, "the one could not exist without the other" (383). In this dark recounting of ‘miraculous’ multiple suicides, Plath has truly converted the anguish of her own experience into universal art —brave and dark on nearly every level, no matter how seemingly unfathomable.

Alvarez, A. "Sylvia Plath." TriQuarterly 7 (1966): 75-74. Rpt. in Poetry Criticism. Ed. Robyn V. Young. Vol. 1. Detroit: Gale Research, 1991. 380-3.

Annas, Pamela J. A Disturbance in Mirrors: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath. Greenwood Press, 1988. 158-61. Rpt. in Poetry Criticism. Ed. Robyn V. Young. Vol. 1. Detroit: Gale Research, 1991. 410-4.

Diyanni, Robert. "Sylvia Plath." Modern American Poets. New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1987. 517-20.

Lowell, Robert. Foreword. Ariel. By Sylvia Plath. New York: Harper & Row, 1966. vii-ix.

Plath, Sylvia. Interview. BBC Radio. 1962. Qtd. in The Collected Poems. Ed. Ted Hughes. New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1993. 198.

---. "Lady Lazarus." Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. Ed. X.J.

Kennedy and Dana Gioia. 2^nd Compact ed. New York: Longman, 2000. 749-51.