Hello and welcome to the Discourse. "Lady Lazarus" is one of Sylvia Plath's most famous and intense confessional poems, published posthumously in Ariel (1965). The poem is a dramatic monologue that explores themes of death, rebirth, suffering, and female identity, framed through the biblical figure of Lazarus, who was raised from the dead by Jesus. However, Plath’s speaker is a defiant, self-destructive "Lady Lazarus," who repeatedly attempts suicide and returns, only to be objectified by spectators. Because the speaker is a woman and identifies different male authority figures as her "enemies," it can be assumed that the speaker is suffering from gender oppression, which seems likely, in turn, to be one of the main reasons she wants to die.
The poem raises the themes of death and rebirth. The speaker presents herself as a performer of resurrection, having "done it again" (likely referring to a suicide attempt). She compares herself to Lazarus, the Holocaust victims ("A sort of walking miracle, my skin / Bright as a Nazi lampshade"), and a phoenix rising from ashes. The cyclical nature of death and revival reflects Plath’s own struggles with suicide and mental illness. The poem critiques society’s voyeuristic fascination with suffering, especially female pain. Plath wrote "Lady Lazarus" in the months before her death in 1963, during intense creativity and despair. Like many of her Ariel poems, it blends personal anguish with mythic grandeur, turning private suffering into universal art.
Structure of Lady Lazarus:
The poem consists of 84 lines divided into 28 tercets (three-line stanzas), a form that lends itself to tight, episodic bursts of imagery and emotion. "Lady Lazarus" employs a highly controlled yet flexible free verse form, with irregular line lengths, sporadic rhyme, and a mix of rhythmic patterns that mirror the speaker’s volatile emotional state. Though the poem lacks a strict meter, Plath uses repetition, enjambment, and abrupt shifts in tone to create an incantatory, almost performative effect—fitting for a poem about staged resurrections and public suffering. The poem is primarily unrhymed, but Plath inserts slant rhymes and internal rhymes for emphasis. Though there is no fixed metrical pattern, Plath mixed iambic ("I have done it a-gain") with trochaic ("Dying / Is an art") and spondaic ("Big strip tease") rhythms, creating a jarring, unpredictable cadence.
The poet has used refrain and repetition, enjambment, caesura, allusion, metaphor, simile, personification, hyperbole, irony, and symbolism in the poem.
Summary of Lady Lazarus:
Lines 1-3
“I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it——”
The poem begins on a mysterious note. The speaker confirms that she has ‘done it again.’ But what has she done? What is this mysterious "it"? One thing is clear: the speaker is engaged in a kind of cycle (she keeps doing "it again"), and this cycle has endured across decades. ‘It’ is something that the speaker wants to do. It's not something she does accidentally. Once every ten years, she "manages" to accomplish it.
Lines 4-9
“A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot
A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine
Jew linen.”
In the second tercet, the speaker brings upon the allusion to the Holocaust imagery and she compares her skin to a “Nazi lampshade”. It is known 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. It should be noted that Sylvia Plath’s father was a German immigrant to the US. As a child Plath was proud of her German heritage, but this began to shift during World War II, when she began feeling shame about her ethnicity due to the atrocities of Nazis against the Jews.
She uses metaphor to express the heaviness of grievance by comparing her foot to a “paperweight.” It suggests that her emotional pain was so real that it felt like a physical weight. The imagery of a ‘featureless face’ suggests the lack of identity and self-worth. She then alludes to the Biblical figure of Lazarus. Jew linens were used to wrap the body of Lazarus before he was laid in the tomb.
She is a living version—a "walking miracle"—of a lampshade made out of the bodies of murdered human beings. The things for which her body is being used are so mundane that it's insulting—lampshades, paperweights. Her body is dead, torn apart to furnish someone else's living room or office.
Lines 10-15
“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.”
In the fourth tercet, the speaker uses Apostrophe and directly addresses the audience as ‘enemy.’ She challenges the audience 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 how she is. She thinks so because she feels she terrifies the audience. After all, although she is alive in the flesh, her soul is dead. She describes what she looks like, and even this simple act takes on a grotesque tone. She figures herself as a kind of living corpse, with "eye pits" instead of eyeballs, and "sour breath" that will disappear once she's actually dead—in a day.
Lines 16-21
“Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me
And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.”
The speaker continues to explain the effects of death, or what she did and kept doing every ten years. As soon as her breath vanishes, she will be laid in the grave, which will devour her flesh. She describes the rotting of dead flesh to convey the way she feels that her soul is decomposing. Then she reveals that she is a woman in her thirties, and despite her near-death experience, she is smiling. However, the tone of ‘Lady Lazarus’ reveals that she is disappointed at being alive. Then she uses a simile and says that she is like the cat with nine lives, however, she has nine deaths, and she has to die nine times.
Lines 22-27
“This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.
What a million filaments.
The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see”
She already declared that she keeps repeating it once every ten years. In her thirties, it must be the third attempt to die; she has six more. The mystery unfolds; the ‘it’ in the first tercet is death, or attempt to die, suicide. The speaker offers more details about her third time dying and compares it to annihilation. She feels as if she's been destroyed once a decade. At the same time, she declares that her life is nothing but trash, justifies her attempts to die, and wonders why not annihilate something worth destroying. She compares her life to a ‘million filaments’ of trash. Then, she describes the unwanted attention she has been offered by people because she just couldn’t die despite her attempt. She calls them the “peanut crunching crowd,” suggesting that they are only in her life to scoff at her and make a spectacle of her.
Lines 28-33
“Them unwrap me hand and foot——
The big strip tease.
Gentlemen, ladies
These are my hands
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,”
In this stanza, the speaker suggests that despite her emotional pain, suffering, and physical deterioration, she is just a joke and entertainment for the crowd, who show no sympathy to her. However, they do show great attention towards her decadence as it is an entertaining show. She imagines that she's in front of a "peanut-crunching crowd," as if it is a circus or a carnival and she's the main event. Folks are so excited, they're shoving their way in to see her. The crowd unwraps her clothing, and she's forced into an imaginary striptease. They can see her body parts—her hands, her knees, her skin and bone. She has been objectified to a piece of spectacle for a hungry crowd.
Lines 34-39
“Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
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”
The speaker says that though she has been turned into a piece of spectacle, she is the "same, identical woman." She's the same naked as she was clothed; this experience hasn't changed her. The speaker is stressing that though she's come back from the dead, she hasn't changed. There has been no metamorphosis, no change in her ordeal, which may not end until her ninth and final attempt. She then explains her previous attempts at death (suicide attempts). The first happened when she was 10 years old, and it was an accident. Her second attempt at death was on purpose, though. She "meant" to "not come back at all." But she was found and brought back to life. As a matter of fact, Sylvia Plath tried to commit suicide during her college years. She took a whole bunch of sleeping pills and then hid in the crawl space of her mother's house.
Lines 40-45
“As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.
Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.”
The speaker mentions another simile and mentions herself as a seashell. She attempted suicide for the second time but was rescued by people. She was almost dead, and the rescuers had to call her again and again, trying to rescue her. She compares worms to ‘sticky pearls’. Even though she was saved, she actually died a bit, becoming food for the worms. She then uses metaphor to suggest that suicide or attempt to death is an art, and she excels in it.
Lines 46-51
“I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I’ve a call.
It’s easy enough to do it in a cell.
It’s easy enough to do it and stay put.
It’s the theatrical”
Like an artist who tries throughout her life to create an everlasting masterpiece, Plath is trying to complete her magnum opus in this art form. Here, the poet uses anaphora as lines 46, 47, and 48 begin with ‘I’ also, lines 46 and 47 repeats ‘I do it so it feels.’ She says that the thoughts of dying are always rampaging in her head, and it turns her mind into hell. She claims that hell is real. It exists, not in an imaginary place but in her mind. She claims death is her call; she feels no purpose in life other than to die. But every time she gets a taste of death, she ends up surviving, only to resume her former suffering. She feels it should be easy enough to end her life in an isolated cell and stay put. Each time she attempts suicide, she is rescued by the rescuers.
Lines 52-57
“Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:
‘A miracle!’
That knocks me out.
There is a charge”
The speaker brings back the imagery of the circus where she is being presented as a piece of spectacle for the ‘peanut-crunching’ crowd. She says that she's making a theatrical comeback. She represents her resurrection—her coming back to life—as a circus act. She's quite the spectacle. Someone—a brute—shouts that she's a "miracle." The shout ‘knocks her out’ is a metaphor to express surprise or amazement, but it may also suggest that she gets knocked down in a hand-to-hand battle. She then mentions that there is a charge for her spectacle; it’s not free.
Lines 58-63
“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”
The comparison to a circus is figurative; the speaker suggests that despite her pain and suffering, she is just a piece of entertainment, and their excitement in her bewilderment appears so strong that she may charge for her performance as she masters the art of dying. People may gather around her and study the artist in her. They can find her scars. To hear the beating of her heart, there is a charge, too. Her heart is still beating, that is she is alive, though a part of her is already dead. They may also take a bit of her ‘blood’ to study or to test. As a bipolar patient, she is a matter of study for observers. However, her blood also symbolizes her anguish, her anger.
Lines 64-69
“Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.
I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby”
In these lines, the poet again alludes to Nazi atrocities and holocaust imagery. She mentions her doctor as her enemy and addresses the doctor as ‘Herr Doktor.’ In German, Herr means Mister. In a way, the poet compares Nazism and Patriarchy while also comparing oppressed Jews and women, victims of Nazism and patriarchy respectively. Nazi doctors performed a ton of cruel and lethal experiments on Jewish people. They often brought the Jewish victims back to health, only to resume their suffering and experiments.
The speaker then reveals why she thinks men are enemies. She says 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. As an object of beauty, she is valuable but she doesn’t charge, the doctors, the Nazis, the men charge for her spectacle, her performance. She, like Jews, remains a victim.
Lines 70-75
“That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.
Ash, ash—
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there——”
The speaker suggests that it is a man’s world and she is valuable for men, as valuable as gold. They keep experimenting on her, and she melts with a shriek because though they do not consider her a living being, she is. She says that she doesn’t underestimate their concerns about her; she realizes that she is valuable to them but only as an object for their pleasure. She imagines as if she has been burned alive in a concentration camp crematorium. The Nazis still continue to check the victims, the things of experiment, they poke and stir but find no remaining flesh or bones but ash.
Lines 76-81
“A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.
Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.”
As the Nazi doctors stir up the ashes, they find no bones or flesh. But they were not looking for that. The Nazis 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.
In the next tercet, the speaker changes her tone to revenge. She continues to blame patriarchy, men, God, and Evil, while addressing them as Herr, alluding to Nazism and warns them.
Lines 82-84
“Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.”
In the last tercet, the speaker alludes to the mythical bird, the Phoenix, that rises from the ashes. She imagines that she's been burnt to death by the Nazis, but here she resurrects. She stays true to her name. But unlike the Lazarus in the Bible, she doesn't need Jesus (or anyone) to make her resurrection happen. She does it all on her own. And once she resurrects, she gains the power to end the evil, oppressive patriarchy.
So this is it for today. We will continue to discuss the history of American English literature. Please stay connected with the Discourse. Thanks and Regards!
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