Ultimately, Lady Lazarus uses her status as a failed suicide as a source of power, not disempowerment. The haunting words of the end of the tale that she is a woman who eats men like air are meant to underline the fact that despite the fact that the doctors feel that they are the source of her coming to life again and again, there is a strength of spirit within her, a kind of devouring frenzy that is frightening and cannot be contained. "Herr God, Herr Lucifer" are all one to Lady Lazarus and her repeated call of "Beware, Beware: echoes Coleridge's poem "Kubla Khan" (79-81). Lady Lazarus is not a poet herself, but a performer, and through the use of such analogies and sharp shifts in language throughout poem Plath makes it clear that Lady Lazarus is a poetic creation. Lady Lazarus speaks like a barker, like a religious woman, like a doctor, like a 19th century poet. By stressing the ironic, 'put-on' aspect of this poetic creation, Plath distances herself from Lady Lazarus. Plath stresses the 'crafted' quality of the poem to indicate that she is more than a suicide, despite the depression...
Her art is not dying alone -- she creates women like Lady Lazarus and destroys men with mocking prose like the doctors.
Sylvia Plath: A Brilliant but Tortured 20th Century American Poet One of America's best known twentieth century poets, Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) lived an artistically productive but tragic life, and committed suicide in 1963 while separated from her husband, the British poet Ted Hughes. Before her death at age 30, Sylvia Plath had suffered a bout of severe depression for several months, the likely result of her separation from Ted Hughes and
Lady Lazarus 'A sort of walking miracle, my skin / Bright as a Nazi lampshade, / My right foot / A paperweight, / My face a featureless, fine / Jew linen," (lines 4-6). Sylvia Plath's poem "Lady Lazarus" is pervaded by chilling imagery evoking Nazi concentration camps and the decay of human flesh. Yet the tone of "Lady Lazarus" is more sarcastic than sad, more angry than fearful. Plath's poem describes
Sylvia Plath: The Use of Dramatic Monologue as Confessional Poetry Sylvia Plath presents an unusual paradox as a writer. On one hand, she is lauded by literary critics, particularly feminist critics, for her use of confessional poetry. Specifically, in poems such as "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus" Plath is assumed to be 'confessing' certain aspects of her personal life. Like the speaker of "Daddy," she was the daughter of a German father;
This is evident from the first as the poet writes, I am inside someone -- who hates me. I look out from his eyes (1-3). This approach allows him to take a jaundiced view of himself and criticize his own shortcomings, as if they were those of someone else. He says he hates himself, meaning more that he hates some of the things he has done and that he may expect
At twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back to you. I thought even the bones will do. (51-60) These lines allow us to see the poet dealing with her anger and the final thought is equally powerful when the poet tells her father, " Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through" (110). The anger, unlike her father, lives and that might be the most agonizing aspect of the poem. There is
All of this had been made possible due to the fact that with every man, or every ten men or every million people killed by the Nazis, the prisoner community only grew stronger and more indifferent to the thought of dying. A reason for why Plath chose to refer to the Holocaust in her poem would be that she considered the occurrence to be one of the worst acts of
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