User:Foucauldienspirit/Lady Lazarus

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"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, with the use of biographical criticism, as an expression of Plath's suicidal attempts and thoughts.

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Structure

The poem is divided in twenty-eight tercet stanzas, and is written in free verse.

Genre

"Lady Lazarus" and Sylvia Plath's poetry catalog falls under the literary genre of Confessional poetry.

According to the American poet and critic, Macha Rosenthal, Plath's poetry is confessional due to the way that she uses psychological shame and vulnerability, centers herself as the speaker, and represents the civilization she is living in. Her husband, Ted Hughes, has characterized her poems as having strong autobiographical elements, as well.

According to scholar Parvin Ghasemi, Lady Lazarus is written in "light verse containing the intense desire to die and be born; it is a poem of personal pain, suffering, and revenge". Light verse,in this context, refers to a Plathian style of writing. Ghasemi addresses this, by quoting English poet Al Alvarez when he states,"her trick is to tell this horror story in a verse form as insistently jaunty and ritualistic as a nursery rhyme". Writer Eileen M. Aird has said of Plath's writing style,"[i]t is clear that Sylvia Plath's description of 'Daddy' and 'Lady Lazarus' as 'light verse' is descriptive of a mode which contrives a highly sophisticated blend of the ironic and the violent"

Illustrations of Plath's depression during WW2[edit | edit source] German Identity and World War II
Plath describes the speaker's oppression with the use of World War II Nazi Germany allusions and images. It is known as one of her "Holocaust poems", along with "Daddy" and "Mary's Song". She develops a German image to denote Nazism and in turn, oppression. She accounts this connotation to the doctors in the poem, such as calling the doctor Herr Doktor, because they continue to bring her back to life when all she wants is to finally die. This is the speaker's third time facing death. She faces once every decade; the first was an accident and the second a failed attempt at reaching death. At the end of the poem, when the speaker experiences the unwanted rebirth, she is represented by the image of a phoenix (a mythical bird that is burned alive and then reborn in the ashes). This next decade will be different for the speaker because she plans to 'eat' the men, in this case doctors, so they cannot revive her next time she faces death. Death to her, was the best possible event during the time of her husband's bad treatment.

Plath was the daughter of a German immigrant ,Otto Plath, and an Austrian immigrant, Aurelia Plath. According to Plath's biographer Heather Clark, the first generation American poet felt a lot of pride around her German identity. This began to shift during World War II where Clark stipulates that she began feeling shame about her identity. "These questions suggest that Sylvia understood from a young age that the German identity she shared with her father was somehow dangerous- a secret source of shame".

Holocaust Imagery

The poem makes several references to the Holocaust too through imagery such as "Bright as a Nazi lampshade", and the last two stanzas:

Herr God, Herr Lucifer

Beware

Beware.

Out of the ash

I rise with my red hair

And I eat men like air.

Ghasemi writes that these stanzas address the deadliness of the Holocaust in general, but the burning of dead bodies that occurred in particular.

The scholar Tegan Jane Schetrumpf also makes connections to the Holocaust, stating that, "Plath compares the merchandise of a miracle-performing saint to the remnants of Holocaust victims to emphasize that she is a relic of death, as postmodernist readers are relics of the Holocaust[.]" And Plath biographer Clark has argued that Plath's uses Holocaust imagery to designate a clear moral binary, while also distancing herself from her Germanness.