On ÐLady LazarusÐ
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Being able to comment on Sylvia Plaths poem ÐLady LazarusÐ, involves coming in contact with the events that shaped her life. She was born in Boston in 1932 and committed suicide in London in 1963. When reading Plaths poetry, especially ÐLady LazarusÐ, one has to keep in mind that the author was deeply scarred by her fathers death, coincidentally at age 8 when she published her first few verses in a Boston newspaper. By the time she was 18, she entered Smith College on a scholarship, she already had an extraordinary list of publications; while she was at Smith she wrote over 500 poems. In the poem Sylvia personifies her self as the female version of Lazarus, and describes how she Ðstrips to deathÐ, and like Lazarus has been brought back from the death, but unlike Lazarus she keeps playing with death, and later achieving her purpose. In ÐLady LazarusÐ, Plath expresses her personal pain and mixes it with her poetic work. She uses this union to escape her world of burdens that she had carried since her daddys death, the one that incremented with her unstable marriage, and the permanent oppression she put on her self by wanting to be perfect.
As many of her other poems, ÐLady LazarusÐ mixes in a very subtle manner, Plaths own pain and the worlds collective agony. She creates a very interesting spark by mixing her real world to her imaginary world, and creating a meaningful and profound, almost perfect poetry. In her first stanza she talks about her self, she opens the poem with a very bold statement in lines 1 to 3: ÐI have done it again./One year in
every ten/ I manage it—-Ð, she talks about her pain. While in college, in her early twenties Plath almost succeeds in committing suicide by swallowing sleeping pills. Nearly ten years later, Plath did succeed in her conspiracy against her self. In her second stanza she alludes to the world scarring event, the Holocaust. In lines 4 to 6 :” A sort of walking miracle, my skin/ Bright as a Nazi lampshade,/My right foot/a paperweight,/My face featureless, fine/Jew linen.” She joins her personal pain to the collective pain, and creates a more dramatic atmosphere. This allusion to the Holocaust is a frequent in Plaths poetry. For example in her poem “Daddy” which is about her oppression and emotional damage in relation to her father, and therefore one can see the direct relation to the intention in Sylvias suicide attempts, when she doesnt only try to kill herself but the little girl who hates her daddy and longs him at the same time.
Sylvia knew how everybody was expectant of her next move, how after her first intent of suicide everybodys eye was on her. She got used to this morbid interest of her family, friends and the critics. From lines 25 to 30, Plath proves this point : “What a million filaments./The peanutcrunching crowd/Shoves in to see/them unwrap me hand and foot——/the big striptease./Gentlemen, ladies/ these are my hands/my knees.” Plath takes disturbing pleasure from being observed so carefully, from being the center of attention, from being the art on display. Not only is Plath, literarily the center of attention in her attempt to commit suicide the first time; but she also has the emotional weight that comes with being a poet and putting fears, joys and intimate experiences out in the open, like a tender wound, for every critic to poke it. What makes Plath such a mesmerizing author is how she follows all the rules, every rule and still managed to put her heart in it. “Dying/is an art, like everything else. /I do it exceptionally well.” In lines
43 to 45, Sylvia mocks herself, a relief to the dark poem in a cynical witty approach to her dramatic failed