Lady Lazarus Essay

Commentary on Lady Lazarus

Sylvia Plath uses dark imagery, disturbing diction, and allusions to shameful historical undertakings to create a morbid yet unique tone that reflects the necessity of life and death in her poem, Lady Lazarus. Even though the imagery, diction and allusions presented in Lady Lazarus are entirely dark and dreary, it seems, looking more closely at Plath’s use of poetic devices, as if that the speaker’s attitude towards death is a positive one. The speaker longs for death, and despises the fact the she is continually raised up out of it. Shown mainly through the word choice, images, allusions, this depressing tone emphasizes the speaker’s feelings about death. Immediately from the title of the poem, the theme
/ One year in every ten / I manage it-----,” (1-3). From the title, it can be inferred that “it” actually to a resurrection of some kind. This conclusion is subsequently corroborated by the listing of how the speaker is reborn, the stages in which life is brought back to her. The entire poem references Lazarus by mentioning how she comes back to life, not just once, but so far, three times: “I am only thirty. / And like the cat I have nine times to die. / This is Number Three,”
Plath alludes to the burning of the Jews in large ovens, burning them down to ash, so that nothing was left but “gold fillings,” and a “wedding ring,” as well as makes reference to another disturbing slander about the Nazi soldiers and how they made soap out of the Jew’s departed bodies as well as lampshades. These terrible images are designed to paint a wretched view of death. Interestingly enough, these images and ideas that death is a horrible, bad thing runs contrary to the speaker’s actual feelings that death is a grand way to escape life, and in the end it is all she (the speaker) really wants to