"Lady Lazarus" is a poem written by
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath (; October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963) was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer. She is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for two of her published collections, '' Th ...
, originally included in ''
Ariel
Ariel may refer to:
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*Ariel Award, a Mexican Academy of Film award
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,'' 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 as an expression of Plath's suicidal attempts and thoughts.
Structure
The poem is divided in twenty-eight
tercet
A tercet is composed of three lines of poetry, forming a stanza or a complete poem.
Examples of tercet forms
English-language haiku is an example of an unrhymed tercet poem. A poetic triplet is a tercet in which all three lines follow the same ...
stanzas, and is written in free verse.
Genre
"Lady Lazarus" and Sylvia Plath's poetry catalog falls under the literary genre of
Confessional poetry
Confessional poetry or "Confessionalism" is a style of poetry that emerged in the United States during the late 1950s and early 1960s. It is sometimes classified as a form of Postmodernism. It has been described as poetry of the personal or "I", ...
.
According to the American poet and critic,
Macha Rosenthal
Macha Louis Rosenthal (March 14, 1917 – July 21, 1996) was an American poet, critic, editing, editor, and teacher. The W. B. Yeats Society of New York renamed their award for achievement in Yeats studies the M. L. Rosenthal Award after Rosenth ...
, 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, the poet
Ted Hughes
Edward James "Ted" Hughes (17 August 1930 – 28 October 1998) was an English poet, translator, and children's writer. Critics frequently rank him as one of the best poets of his generation and one of the twentieth century's greatest wri ...
, 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
Alfred Alvarez (5 August 1929 – 23 September 2019) was an English poet, novelist, essayist and critic who published under the name A. Alvarez and Al Alvarez.
Background
Alfred Alvarez was born in London, to an Ashkenazic Jewish mother and a ...
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, "
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".
German identity and World War II
Plath describes the speaker's oppression with the use of allusions and images invoking
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing ...
-era
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany (lit. "National Socialist State"), ' (lit. "Nazi State") for short; also ' (lit. "National Socialist Germany") (officially known as the German Reich from 1933 until 1943, and the Greater German Reich from 1943 to 1945) was ...
.
It is known as one of her "
Holocaust
The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; ...
poems", along with "
Daddy
A father is the male parent of a child. Besides the paternal bonds of a father to his children, the father may have a parental, legal, and social relationship with the child that carries with it certain rights and obligations. An adoptive fathe ...
" and "Mary's Song".
Plath was the daughter of a German immigrant,
Otto Plath
Otto Emil Plath (April 13, 1885 – November 5, 1940) was a German American writer, academic, and biologist. Plath worked as a professor of biology and German at Boston University, and as an entomologist, with a specific expertise on bum ...
, and an Austrian immigrant,
Aurelia Plath
Aurelia Frances Plath (née Schober; April 26, 1906 – March 11, 1994) was the wife of Otto Emil Plath, the mother of the American poet Sylvia Plath, and her brother Warren, and the grandmother of Frieda Rebecca Hughes and Nicholas Farrar Hug ...
. 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 through imagery such as "Bright as a Nazi lampshade," and in the last two stanzas:
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 uses Holocaust imagery to designate a clear moral binary, while also distancing herself from her Germanness.
Omissions
When compared to early manuscripts and the audio recording, the published version omits several lines of verse. When Plath recorded this poem for the
BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC
Here i going to introduce about the best teacher of my life b BALAJI sir. He is the precious gift that I got befor 2yrs . How has helped and thought all the concept and made my success in the 10th board exam. ...
...
in October 1962, her version included a line after line 12 of the published version, "Do I terrify?" The recorded version goes on, "Yes, yes, Herr Professor, it is I. Can you deny?" Another line of "I think I may be Japanese" follows line 33 of the published poem, "I may be skin and bone."
.
The speaker describes her attempts at committing suicide not as failures, but as successful resurrections, like those described in the tales of the biblical character
and the myth of the phoenix. By the end of the poem, the speaker has transformed into a firebird, effectively marking her rebirth, which some critics liken to a demonic transformation.