"Lady Lazarus"

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tvSDw84ArQ

Sylvia Plath’s poem “Lady Lazarus” is one about about her close encounters with death through her numerous suicide attempts. She starts off with, “I have done it again./ One year in every ten/ I manage it-“ to convey that she has a breakdown and attempts suicide once in every decade. She explains that this current attempt is “Number Three” out of her “nine times to die”. Plath’s first encounter was at the age of ten, and it was an accident.  She writes “ They had to call and call/ And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls” to describe how her second attempt was nearly successful.

            Plath asks the reader, “Peel off the napkin/O my enemy./Do I terrify?-“ , and she knows that she does spark fear in the reader. Her mere escapes from death are seen as miracles and are put on as a show for an audience to gawk at. She mocks the show and the audience for their interest in her miracle. “For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge/for the hearing of my heart-/ it really goes.”

            At the end of the poem Plath describes herself as something of value, somebody’s “pure gold baby” that melts and shrieks and turns. This could be referring to her father, who she referenced in many of her other poems. She ends the poem by telling all beware, that out of the ashes of her successful death she will rise and defeat her men, “eating them like air”. Plath uses many metaphors and similes to create a mood and express her emotions, which are dark, raw, and sarcastic all wrapped in one.