Others see the imagery as both valuable for a poem about much more than one woman’s suicidal view and also as applicable in a modern brutal world.Īgain, we are struck with a strong shift in tone in the middle of the ninth stanza. Some critics, however, have found them highly inappropriate for the poem, a desperate grasp for a horrific image.
Later in the poem, allusions to the Holocaust will recur and intensify. With this third rebirth has come courage.
#Lazarus resurrection poem skin#
Instead, it looks like she is not the only one responsible for this, her third death, for her skin is compared to “a Nazi lampshade” and her face a “featureless, fine / Jew linen.” She speaks now to “O my enemy” and asks “Do I terrify?” The narrator is far from just happy to be alive, then, but has another quest-revenge on her murderers. Now the narrator is not just a victim of suicide who has made it back. The feeling is reinforced by the narrator’s modest “I manage it,” as well as her description of herself as a “ sort of walking miracle” (emphasis added). But the narrator is not a human who has stolen divine power but one who just happens to have it. Not only has she brought herself back from the dead, but she has done it three times (a number that has some significance in the Bible, also).Ĭuriously, the poem starts with the disarmingly colloquial comment about her power to bring herself back from the dead: “I have done it again.” The ability to bring someone back to life-what is usually construed as a divine power-has become humanized and almost too easy. However, in this poem, it is a woman who comes back from the dead-on her own-without the help of a male/God figure. Its title refers to the biblical story in which Christ brought Lazarus back from the dead. The poem’s title, its final line, and much of what is in between, focus on annihilation, rebirth, and female power. “Lady Lazarus” is just one of numerous poems that has a voice radically distinct from that in Plath’s previous work, which was more controlled, impersonal, and traditional. The poem was written in the frenzy of October 1962, when Plath was separated from her husband, Ted Hughes, and wrote nearly a poem a day just prior to her thirtieth birthday at the end of the month. The poem is about attempting suicide it speaks of close calls with death at the ages of ten, twenty, and thirty, and Plath did nearly die from an accident at age ten, tried to kill herself at twenty, and purposefully ran her car off the road at thirty. There are some elements in “Lady Lazarus” that are so autobiographically based that they must be acknowledged from the start.
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