Lady Lazarus EMS

Lady Lazarus, by Sylvia Plath, is a poem about the female narrator coming back from the dead, like Lazarus in the bible. Unlinke Lazarus, however, the narrator's deaths, except for the first, seem to be coming from suicides. She says "I am only thirty. / And like the cat I have nine times to die. / This is Number Three." This makes it sound as if she will continue to attempt suicide until she finally succeeds.

It seems obvious that these suicide attempts are referring to Plath's actual suicide attempts. She tried to kill herself at 20, and killed herself at 30. The accidental death referred to in the poem could be a near-death experience for her when she was younger, or possibly a reference to her father's death at 8.

While the poem centers on the return from death, it also includes a few references to her being the center of attention to her critics. These critics, "The peanut-crunching crowd / Shove in to see / Them unwrap me hand and foot--- / The big strip tease." This seems to be a reference to how Plath puts so much of her personal pain into her work, and can be see in the words "Dying / Is an art". She seems to resent her apparent selling-out of her pain, throuigh the lines "There is a charge / For the eyeing of my scars" and "And there is a charge, a very large charge / For a word or a touch / Or a bit of blood". She seems to be selling her pain, something that she really seems to detest.

Like some of Plath's other poetry, she seems to villify her father as a nazi. She says "So, so, Herr Doktor. So, Herr Enemy." She describes the way the nazis sifted through the ashes of their victims to find gold, and makes the imagery of a phoenix with "Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And i eat men like air." This imagery seems to suggest Plath believes that through her misery brought on by her father