Lady Lazarus #

1. Context & Subject Matter #

Known for her emotional honesty, Silvia Plath leaves little to our imaginations in these open candid self portrayals. Sylvia Plath was traumatised by the early death of her dominant father when she was eight as she worshiped him.

Though Plath was a good student, (winning scholarships to Smith’s College and Cambridge) she was a perfectionist and early already displayed signs of a fragile psyche; schizophrenia or some form of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, perhaps from the early death of her father. When she failed to gain admission to Harvard University, she attempted to commit suicide with sleeping tablets. Despite her anger at being “dragged back to life” that seemed to her, “sordid and meaningless”.

After her marriage to Ted Hughes failed she managed to successfully commit suicide by sealing off her kitchen, turning on the gas oven and placing her head in it.

Much of the interest the public took to Plath’s poetry has a salacious, ghoulish and voyeuristic stench to it. As one uncharitable critic put it; “It was a smart career move”. Her editor at the New Yorker said that her poems were better because “what their author threatened she performed, and her work gained an extra status of truth” – because she killed herself.

Suicide has been an ongoing historical problem. Judas felt betrayed by the Jewish authorities so resorted to it. Hamlet contemplates it; Ophelia commits it. Abraham Lincoln entertained it following his persistent “melancholy”, which had every appearance of severe clinical depression following the death of fiancée Ann Rutledge.

Suicide rates among Australian women are growing far more rapidly than among men, according to ABS data. Between 2008 and 2017, suicide rates grew 31% among women compared to 11% among men. Nicky Gemmell reports:

Normally suicides are not reported to avoid copycat syndromes. However done without sensation, they can lead to better avoidance. Pandemics and social exclusion give rise to increases.

Claudia Neale, a year 12 student from a prestigious independent school in North Sydney, recently took her own life. She was an A-Grade scholarship student – captain of the school swimming team. She may have felt inadequate and excluded in some way. Sporting champions are often excelling in an attempt to cover up for feelings of inadequacy in other areas.

Much of what we know about a lot of modern poets comes from their letters, especially to their families, friends and psychiatrists. A published writer can have no private writing as every scrap will eventually come to light and posterity gives them a posthumous existence. This is particularly so of T.S. Eliot, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore and Plath.

Lady Lazarus #

I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it——

A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot

A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine
Jew linen.

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.
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.

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.
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.

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.

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.
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.
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.

Ash, ash—
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there——

A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.

II. Sound Effects #

Read the poem aloud. Comment on the Sound Effects, verbal music. It’s rhyme. Rhythm and melody. Assonance, alliteration. Onomatopoeia. etc. (Blending repetition patterns. slow/fast movement, harsh, discordant, sibilance, sotto, allegro, Rhapsodic, lyrical, elegiac, upbeat, blue, staccato, dirge, ode, Melody. tone. mood. atmosphere. voice.

**You can hear Sylvia Plath read Lady Lazarus at: **http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esBLxyTFDxE&feature=related

Poets can make words sing by blending meaning and using sound to convey mood in an emotive and suggestive manner. Some poets deliberately use incantation and repetition in an attempt to cast a spell over their readers, allowing them to escape reality and enter the world of dreams, imagination and fantasy. The subtle repetition of vowel sounds (rhyme, assonance) can create a distinctive mood or ambience. The repetition of consonants (alliteration) can also obliquely affect the emotions of the responders.

Poetry does not tell us about an experience, rather it attempts to recreate it by allowing us to imaginatively and sensuously participate vicariously in that experience by focusing on it and ordering it through verisimilitude.

Assonance: Plath achieves a stark effect through monosyllabic plosives - all, call, well, hell, real, call, cell, theatrical incantory spells that can create cognitive interference. Grave cave ate– could refer to her first suicide attempt after her father died when she went missing and after three days, her brother found her under the house in a cavity drowsy from sleeping tablets.

Others narrow the specificity of the “cave” myth by pointing to two recurring patterns in her texts and life: namely that in some way Plath is enclosed ‘…in plaster, in a bell jar, a cellar, or a wax house…’ and that her central concern was one of revolt, ‘How to reactivate the myth of a flight so white, so pure, as to be a rebirth into the imagined liberty of childhood?’ (Gilbert and Gunbar in Brennan 1999:54). This freedom recurs in Ariel and Whiteness I have known.

Plath’s poetry, like Emily Dickson’s, is pared down to a minimum elliptical condensed style – stripped down - that still communicates.

The persona appears detached and impersonal. While there is intense feeling, pain and anguish, it is not maudlin or wallowing in self-pity or appealing for sympathy, rather realistically and resignedly fatalistic.

The tone modulates, beginning with self deprecation and self-mockery, it becomes accusingly sarcastic of her spectators, triumphant of her ability and finally threatening a vengeful resurrection to conquer the patriarchy. Though she may die, her poetry will revive her.

III. Themes, Issues, Values, Concerns #

Perhaps the most intimate personal emotional experience exploring the dark feelings of the underside of life – “a cry from the heart” or from a confessional poet who dares to probe private taboo subjects. Plath cites influences from Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Ted Hughes and Robert Lowell who were not afraid to plumb the depths of their psychological problems in public declarations of their secret and private lives. Lowell, her professor, wrote about his treatment in a mental institution. There is evidence that Plath was subjected to electro-shock treatment following a suicide attempt. It may be the poetry of raw emotion according to Ted Hughes. “Plath went straight for the central unacceptable things.” What Craig Seligman called the “not-niceness of things”.

Sylvia Plath has openly and frankly admitted that she had a happy childhood but a sad adolescence after the death of her father. Her mother, Aurelia Plath tells us that Sylvia was very active in caring for her father after his leg was amputated and spent a lot of time praying for his health. In the morning, informed of his death, she pulled the covers over her head and cried, “I’ll never speak to God again”.

“Suicide is a permanent reaction to a temporary problem”. (Abraham Lincoln?) Plath admits to three attempts, writing, “I blissfully succumbed to the whirling blackness that I honestly believed was eternal oblivion”. She also claimed she lived in two extremes - “joyous positives and despairing negatives” surely exemplifying bi-polarism or manic depression.

Another recurring motif is a resurrection.

As in Daddy Plath is using her writing as therapy; by a frank and full admission of her pain she is hoping for some cathartic release of tension and an exorcism of the demons that haunt her. While the poem is intensely emotional, it never deteriorates into sentimentality. There is no evidence of self-pity or appeal to sympathy.

The trauma of her loss makes it difficult to relate to men as she “eats men like air”.

IV. TECHNIQUE #

Structure*: linear, circular, episodic, flash backs, climatic.

Images: (visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile, gustatory) figures of speech: similes, metaphors, personification, analogy, synecdoche, contrast, antithesis, unity, irony, Allusions, etc.

This is a dramatic monologue that takes a personal experience and relates it to the wider world. Sylvia Plath said that her “Personal experience is very important, but ….. I believe poetry should be relevant to larger things such as Hiroshima and Dachau and so on.”

Sylvia Plath is not a confessional poet though she claims it possible to deal with highly personal emotional experiences as long as you can control and manipulate those experiences with an informed and intelligent mind and relate them to greater issues. Here she manages to strip herself naked by baring her soul and exposing the dark underside of her cries from the heart. It may or may not be possible to empathise with her.

Biblical Allusions: #

Lazarus: the story is only found in chapter 11 of the Gospel of John. Lazarus, a brother of Mary and Martha and a friend of Jesus died and has already been in his tomb for four days. Jesus then calls Lazarus to come out and Lazarus does so. Plath uses the allusion to refer to her own resurrections from the dead following her three suicide attempts.

Nazi allusions: As in Daddy Plath appropriates the persecution and torture of victims of the Nazis in their death camps. – A bit of hyperbole.

Nazi lampshade, Peel off my napkin, A cake of soap, wedding ring, gold filling…

Ash: Multiple possibilities, literal ash from the consumption of the melting gold baby, the ash of Jewish victims of the holocaust, or the ash from which the Phoenix firebird is reborn.

Phoenix: a mythical bird; a fire spirit with a colorful plumage. It has a 500 to 1000 year life-cycle, near the end of which it builds itself a nest of twigs that it ignites; both nest and bird burn fiercely and are reduced to ashes, from which a new, young phoenix or phoenix egg arises, reborn anew to live again.

It is one of the sacred symbols of worship at Heliopolis, Egypt closely associated with the rising sun and the Egyptian sun-god Ra. The Phoenix has long been presented as a symbol of rebirth, immortality, and renewal^(1\ )¹Excerpts From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Like the Phoenix, Plath claims she will be reborn and declares to take revenge on men. Even in despair, renewal is possible.

Cat: Like the cat having nine lives, Plath seems incapable of dying.

Peanut crunching crowd: The morbid ghoulish circus show spectators - (not a dignified theatre audience?) voyeurs? critics? - her fans? The general public? Us?

Strip tease: She compares herself to a performer in a strip club and itemises her body parts;”

hands, knees, skin, bone, ….bit of blood, hair on my clothes”

Nudity - Naked, unclad and nudity have fascinated us since primaeval times.

Once Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, the eyes of both of them were opened, realizing they were naked; they sewed fig leaves together and covered themselves.

In most wars, women become victims, as victorious troops exact revenge by stripping and raping them. Stripping is generally a mark of humiliation and indignity to emphasise dominance.

In the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan, in Amritsar, on the Indian side of the border, a large group of Muslim women was stripped naked, paraded through the streets and raped by a Sikh mob.

Strip clubs flourish during good times. Exhibitionism coexists with masochism. Strippers see their patrons as pathetic, forced to hide their contempt.

Shakespeare has Hamlet, say, “Clothes maketh the man.”

Mark Twain added his own twist by suggesting “naked people have little or no influence in this world”.

Sylvia Plath recorded that as part of her admission procedures to Smith’s College, she was subjected to being photographed naked with both a frontal and profile shot.

In The Bell Jar Esther manages to beat off an attempted rapist, but is left dirtied, humiliated and abused, and on her return to the Amazon [the Barbizon] goes up to the roof of the hotel and throws all her clothes off the parapet. As she stands there, in the hour before dawn, she watches her outfits – the outward symbols of her false self – disappear into the dark heart of Manhattan.

V. LANGUAGE: #

Approach*: Subjective/Objective, Attitude or Tone, Audience,
Style: diction, word play, puns, connotative/denotative, emotive (coloured biased,) /demotive, (technical, dispassionate) clichés, proverbial, idiomatic, expressive, flat, Jargon, euphemisms, pejorative, oxymoron. Gender biases. Register: formal, stiff, dignified or Colloquial; relaxed, conversational, inclusive, friendly or Slang; colourful, intimate, Rhetorical devices; Questions, exclamations, cumulation, crescendo, inversion, bathos, repetition, 3 cornered phrases. *

Poets use suggestion and ambiguity to enrich their poems with multiple possibilities, enigma or mystique. A good poem will always fascinate or resonate with us because of restless disquiet that we cannot fully get on top of the poem’s meaning. Oscar Wilde claims that “as soon as you understand a great work of art; it dies for you”.

Grave cave ate – literally the deterioration of the body in a near death experience.

Call- alludes to Jesus calling out for Lazarus or for her brother calling her back to life, but seven lines later refers to a “calling” – an aptitude or predisposition – a gene? Sadly on March 16, 2009, her son Nicholas 45, also committed suicide after battling depression for some time.

Brute shout– her audience or her tormentor – her father.

Charge - Admission charge, a price for us to pay for her poetry, or a cost to the performer who shows us her scars?

Herr Doctor/Herr Enemy - Her father called Dr Otto Plath – not German but Polish.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer - Heaven or Hell – Look out here I come, yet I shall be reborn and haunt men.

VI. Evaluation: #

Sylvia Plath wrote a letter to her brother claiming that she was writing her best ever poem. Its tight construction may support that assertion.

Barbara Hardy:

The personal presence in the poetry, though dynamic and shifting, makes itself felt in a full and large sense, in feeling,thinking, and language. (from Enlargement or Derangement? Ariel Ascending: Writings About Sylvia Plath, Paul Alexander, ed. (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1985)

Elizabeth Hardwick:

We cannot truly separate the work from the fascination and horror of the death… It is interesting to make the effort to read Sylvia Plath’s poems as if she were still alive. They are just as brilliant, just as much creations of genius, but they are obscured and altered. Blood, reds, the threats do not impress themselves so painfully upon us. (from On Sylvia Plath, Ariel Ascending: Writings About Sylvia Plath)

Al Alvarez:

“hindsight can alter the historical importance but not the quality of the verse”. from Sylvia Plath: A Memoir Ariel Ascending: Writings About Sylvia Plath).

No reader of The Bell Jar, which was closely based on her experiences in the summer of 1953, can forget the scene in which Esther Greenwood, Plath’s alter ego, is asked to pose for a photograph holding a paper rose: “Show us how happy it makes you to write a poem,” the photographer cajoles her.

The rest of Plath’s life and work can be seen as her response to that inane, implicitly sexist suggestion:

“I do it so it feels like hell. / I do it so it feels real,”

“Lady Lazarus.”AMERICAN ISIS, The Life and Art of Sylvia PlathBy Carl Rollyson reviewed by ADAM KIRSCH

An excellent essay @: https://www.bachelorandmaster.com/britishandamericanpoetry/lady-lazarus.html#.XqkGSGgzZAk