“Lady Lazarus” By: Janet Jackson, Published: 1965
“Lady Lazarus” is a poem by Sylvia Plath that was estimated to be written in 1962 and published in 1965. This poem is a personal composition that addresses Plath’s many suicide attempts along with her struggle for freedom in the patriarchal and misogynistic eras of the 1950s and 1960s. It falls under the genre of confessional poetry which means that it uses the word “I” and is typically of a very personal nature. Sylvia Plath was somewhat a founder of this genre as it was just beginning to become a classification of poetry in the late 1950s. Sylvia Plath was born on October 27th, 1932 and died at only 30 years old on February 11th, 1963 by suicide. This date is significant because she wrote “Lady Lazarus” only a year or maybe even less than one before her death. This poem was arguably written during the darkest time of Plath’s life as she was clinically depressed and going through a separation with her husband. “Lady Lazarus” is a work of art that Sylvia Plath displays her raw emotion and complete vulnerability through expressing her overwhelming struggles with depression and her thoughts vengeance against her husband and men in general during this time period.
In the first stanza of her poem, Sylvia Plath writes “I have done it again. / One year in every ten / I manage it”. The “it” she is referring to is a suicide attempt. She describes herself in the next two stanzas as “A sort of walking miracle, my skin / Bright as a Nazi lampshade, / My right foot / A paperweight, / My face a featureless, fine / Jew linen”. Her description of her skin as a “walking miracle” depicts a vivid image of her surprise that she is still alive after all of her struggles. She also uses an oxymoron when describing her skin through the simile: “Bright as a Nazi lampshade”. A lampshade is something to prevent a light from being as bright and combined with the word Nazi points to a very gloomy and ominous disposition, especially considering the time period in which this was written as it was just 17 years after World Was II. Describing her face as a “featureless, fine Jew linen” shows that perhaps she is weakened and depressed with the use of the words “fine” and “featureless”. Her tone in these first few stanzas are very different than her tone in later stanzas of the poem in which she writes “Herr God, Herr Lucifer / Beware / Beware. / Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air.” She is now literally warning Lucifer and God that when she does die, she will have a vengeance to seek. She has almost embraced her suicide which happened very shortly after she wrote this and will be free in a way from her husband and any other causes of her stress. She becomes so powerful in the last two lines as she says she will “rise with [her] red hair” after she has passed and that will “eat men like air”
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