Lady Lazarus by Sylvia Plath: Summary

The poem begins on the real plane: "I have done it again". Sylvia Plath had made another attempt at suicide, after ten years of a previous
one. Then she goes on to describe the situation, focusing especially on her body first.

But the very second tercet introduces Plath’s concern for the torture of the Jews: she compares her skin with the lampshade that the Nazi
concentration camps made by flaying the Jew’s skin! Then another important stylistic element of the poem, that of surrealistic images, is
also immediately introduced: the speaker irrationally compares her feet with a paperweight and her face with linen cloth, that the Jews
wear.

She then addresses the reader as her ‘enemy’, assuming that the reader is just the same male. In the fifth tercet, Plath presents an image
of her own dead body foreboding (and foreshadowing) her death. The image is horrible, but it seems that the speaker is trying to come to
terms with death that she was trying to embrace by rejecting life and people. She continues of the vision in the next two stanzas also: she
says that her flesh will soon be eaten by the grave. She is only thirty-one, and she has attempted three times. She finds it boring to
attempt it again and again, and also irritating when a crowd of people surrounds to see her after the failed attempt at suicide.

Plath tells a personal truth; she was ten when she tried it for the first time. The second time she had meant to do it earnestly. But they
pulled her back into life. She says she has an affinity and skill at death; dying, she says, is an art, and she does it exceptionally well. But
the comeback is theatrical, coming to the same place, the same faces, the same brutes who call the rescue (and new life they think they
have given her) a miracle. But there is a cost (charge) for all the things they do; the doctors, especially take advantage of it. The mention
of doctor reminds her of the German doctors who experimented on the dead bodies of the Jews in the concentration camps. “So, so,
Herr (Mr.) Doktor (German spelling). So Herr Enemy… Her God, Herr Lucifer…” this disgust and rage against the doctor, god and Satan
brings the poem round to the general humanitarian protest that is at the symbolic center of the poem. This reminds her of the many
images of torture of the Jews by the Germans in the Second World War, “I am your opus”, says the poet, to the doctor identifying herself
with the victim on whom the doctor is going to perform an operation for learning something about the human body! Similarly, she is also
the corpse for the scavengers to collect gold ornaments, for the ‘dentists’ to look for golden teeth, and for the German industry owner to
make soap out of the fat from her body. The German actually did all these during the war! The second-last stanza however turns the
table on all the enemies: Plath borrows the phrase “Beware, beware” from ST Coleridge to mean that the female poet has been born out
of this atrocious murder, and so the people are now to be cautious of her. In Coleridge, the persona wishes that if he could revive the
original, mythical power of music and poetry, he would be regarded as a heavenly inspired man, awesome to everyone. But here, Plath
suggests that a vengeance female figure has been born and will “eat men like air”. This also suggests the birth of the Phoenix from the
ashes of the traditionally burnt women. She means that all the traditions, including social, political, cultural and literary have tortured and
destroyed the female identity; but now a new woman is being born. This poem can also be seen as an allegory of the feminist uprising in
the sixties.

ylvia Plath (/plæθ/; October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963) was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer. Born in Boston, she
studied at Smith College and Newnham College at the University of Cambridge before receiving acclaim as a poet and writer. She was
married to fellow poet Ted Hughes from 1956 until they separated in September 1962. They lived together in the United States and then
in England and had two children, Frieda and Nicholas. Plath was clinically depressed for most of her adult life, and was treated multiple
times with electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). She committed suicide in 1963.

Plath is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for two of her published collections, The Colossus and
Other Poems and Ariel, and The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her death. In 1982, she won a
posthumous Pulitzer Prize for The Collected Poems.

Plath made her first medically documented suicide attempt in late August 1953 by crawling under her house and taking her mother's
sleeping pills.[14] She survived this first suicide attempt after lying unfound in a crawl space for three days, later writing that she
"blissfully succumbed to the whirling blackness that I honestly believed was eternal oblivion."[2] She spent the next six months in
psychiatric care, receiving more electric and insulin shock treatment under the care of Dr. Ruth Beuscher.[2] Her stay at McLean Hospital
and her Smith Scholarship were paid for by Olive Higgins Prouty, who had successfully recovered from a mental breakdown herself. Plath
seemed to make a good recovery and returned to college. In January 1955, she submitted her thesis, The Magic Mirror: A Study of the
Double in Two of Dostoyevsky's Novels, and in June graduated from Smith with highest honors.[15]