Lady Lazarus FK

"Lady Lazarus" is a poem written in October 1962 by Sylvia Plath. One important thing to note about this poem is that it was written a few months before Sylvia Plath took her life.

The poem is made up off 84 lines arranged in 28 triplets. There is no apparent rhyme scheme in this poem, but a number of the lines consist of internal rhyming. The overall theme of this poem is death. Like a lot of Sylvia Plath's other poems there are many refrences to Nazi's and Jew's. For example in lines 4-5 Plath compares her skin to that of a Nazi lampshade and in lines 8-9 she compares her featureless face to that of a Jew linen. Another refrence that appears a few times in this poem is a refrence to Lucifer and God. There is also good use of figrutive imagery throughout this poem. One example is lines 6-7 where Plath uses a metaphor to compare the weight of her right foot to that of a paper weight. This poem seems to be written in the perspective of Sylvia Plath explaining her own death.

This poem seems to be Sylvia Plath's way of foreshadowing her future death. She starts off the poem by saying she has done it again. Plath says she does it once in every ten years. Here I think Plath is talking taking her life. I am assuming she has tried to take her life before, but to no success. In line 21 Plath talks about how she is like a cat and has nine lives and in line 22 she says this is her third life. In line 35 Plath says the first time she tried to take her life was when she was ten. I feel that this might have occured because off her fathers death because it occured around the same time. She says that this time it was an accident but she goes on to explain that the second time she tried she meant it. In the fifeteenth triplet Plath says that dying is an art and she is exceptionally well at it. She then uses the rest of the poem to describe her third attempt on her life (which hasn't happened yet). She uses a lot of Nazi and Jew refrences here. In the 24th triplet I believe Plath is comparing her third attempt at dying to Jew's getting killed by Nazi's at concentration camps. She talks about how she burns and her enemy pokes and stirs her ashes and all that remains is a wedding ring. This imagery here really paints a picture of Jew's getting burned at concentration camps. At the end of the poem Plath warns God and Lucifer that she will rise again out of the ash.