![]() ![]() I also noticed a lot of rhyme in this particular stanza. She feels as if her life is rotten, decaying away and that it is painful to endure. This is yet another way to depict how Lady Lazarus feels about her life. Lazarus gives us this gory description of her as some sort of zombie or walking corpse, who is alive but has already started to rot before she has even been buried. Lady Lazarus, in saying she’s half dead, explains that in coming close to dying so many times, that it feels as if her grave ate her flesh. The lines are short but when you think about them in more depth you find that the poem is more than what it seems to be at first glance. One thing I like about the style in which Plath constructed this poem is that though the lines are short and seem empty at first there are many metaphors and hidden meanings throughout the poem. This makes reading through the poem very quick, and it changes direction rather fast. Plath has written the poem in “Tercets” (lines of three), with short quick sentences. Through reading the poem, it was here that I recognized, or rather paid more attention to, the structure of the poem. She makes it a point to say that all these things, her teeth and the sour breath will vanish when she’s fully dead. Lady Lazarus forces us to feel the pain and suffering she feels in her life by portraying the way that life feels like death to her, and by making it clear that she’d rather be dead than live another day on this earth. I think that she’s trying to portray that though she may be alive and well, she still feels as if she is dead, or that she may as well be dead. Here Lady Lazarus gets very descriptive with her imagery, describing herself as a living corpse. The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth? Also, just like Lazarus was resurrected from the dead, Lady Lazarus seems to be foreshadowing that she will, like each time before, rise again. Lady Lazarus is stating that although society has oppressed her and beaten her down, she will get back on her high horse eventually, just like the saying in Nazi Germany. ![]() ![]() In the time of Nazi Germany, the Jews would address an enemy and say “though I have fallen I will rise.” Here Lady Lazarus is continuing to represent to us the strong connection she feels with Jewish people. Lady Lazarus sees herself as a victim, or a “Jew” in a concentration camp. She makes the enemy out to be the Germans which figuratively speaking represents society, or possibly Plath’s father, who was of German descent and a Nazi sympathizer. Lady Lazarus continues to reference Jews and Nazi Germany in this stanza. When she says one year in every ten she has attempted to kill herself, she says this in a way that gives the impression that she doesn’t see this as a very big deal, it’s just something that happens every ten years or so, just like any other minor mishap in everyday life. She’s saying she’s done it again so to say, she has made another attempt at taking her own life. Here the first stanza is referring to Plath’s various suicide attempts throughout her life. Since Plath is using Lady Lazarus as a way to disconnect herself from her poetry, Lady Lazarus is actually a direct reflection of Sylvia Plath. The first stanza starts out with a sort of confession from our speaker, Lady Lazarus. I will come back to explain the use of the name in the title later on. Plath additionally uses names in a lot of her poems as a way to separate herself from her work. Clearly there is a reason Plath is using Lazarus as a way to describe the speaker. In the Bible, Lazarus was actually resurrected by Jesus back from the dead. ![]() In my first time reading Lady Lazarus I thought nothing of the title, but after closer consideration I realized that the title is usually a huge contributing factor to the poem. To start out, the name sets the entire scene for the entire poem. ![]()
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