“Lady Lazarus” Poem by Sylvia Plath

In “Lady Lazarus,” Plath confesses her several attempts to commit suicide. In the second stanza, it seems like she kills herself and comes back to life–she can’t explain how she’s still alive, “A sort of walking miracle.” Plath mentions her fight against life, she calls life her enemy, “O my enemy” something that won’t let her die. Because every time she tries to commit suicide, she’s being brought back to life by doctors, who she refers to as, “Herr Doktor.” It’s as if she had nine lives as she mentions in the line, “And like the cat I have nine times to die.” She has no success in killing herself, but she looks forward to the ninth time, in which she’ll die for good.

At the same time, Plath seems to be celebrating the times she has died and she’s proud of it, “I do it exceptionally well.” Also, she makes fun of herself, of her situation–her misery–her attempts to commit suicide, “I guess you could say I’ve a call.” Plath seems to be playing with this concept of dying, which she has experienced herself. She reveals her suffering in this life, “The sour breath/I turn and burn,” but at the same time she manages to find humor in her misery.

In the lines, “Comeback in broad day/To the same place, the same face the same brute,” it’s clear that Plath resents the times that she was brought back to life. She gives us (the reader) an idea of how much she’s trying to avoid her life–her suffering. She comes back to her same life, the one she has been trying to escape from, and she resents that.

Furthermore, the lines in this poem carry a lot of energy. Part of this is because she writes about the struggles in her life that she seems to want to escape with death–her personal experience with death, and at the same time a cry for help. For example, in the last stanzas, Plath seems very upset–with anger, “You poke and stir…And I eat men like air.” I suspect that she’s angry at those who have not let her die. The anger that she reveals is part of the energy that is felt in the poem. And the other part that adds to the energy of the poem is the repetition of words such as, “I do it so if feels like hell/I do it so it feels real.” Plath also uses rhyme, for example in the lines, “…exceptionally well/…feels like hell/…say I’v a call/…do it in a cell/…stay put/…in broad day/the same brute,” she utilizes the ‘I’ and the ‘a’ sound a lot among the other sounds. She doesn’t stay with one particular rhyme scheme, she uses different ones such as in the line, “To last it out and not come back at all.” She utilizes rhyme within the same line, which is different from the rhyme in the lines I mentioned earlier.

In the line, “Peel off the napkin,’ since Plath is talking about her enemy, it feels as if she’s saying, “Peel off the skin.” That’s how I read this line. I suspect that Plath is playing with words here and utilizes napkin instead of “skin” in order to have a double meaning and also because using the word “skin” would be too cliché. In other words, it has the same effect without being a cliché, which I find very clever of her.