Lady Lazarus by Sylvia Plath: Introduction

Lady Lazarus by Sylvia Plath is written in the explosive productivity of the last months of Sylvia Plath's life and published posthumously in Ariel (1965), this poem is both a promise and a curse. The poem articulates the furious despair necessary to commit suicide, combining the need to get out of life with the energy to act on that need.

It is a poignant expression of her resentment, even vengeance, against the male- dominated society, for all the oppression upon women like the speaker of the poem, and also the many kinds of violence for which man is responsible. The speaker expresses her rage against everyone around her; the physical setting of the poem can be imagined to be the deathbed of Plath herself when she was nervously broken and bedridden after the unsuccessful attempt at suicide.

But the people, especially the males that she mentions in the poem, must be taken as a symbol of generic the male and the symbolic representations like the brutal force and violence like that of the German Nazis with their monstrous Hitler, war and genocide, oppression and atrocity, science and bleak rationality, as well as a symbol of more general inhuman agents of oppression in the world. The male, whether it is daddy or a doctor or even god, in Plath’s poems usually symbolizes these destructive agents; the feminine persona, on the other hand, is also a symbol of generic, universal female, the creative force, humility, love and humanity in general.

In this poem a disturbing tension is established between the seriousness of the experience described and the misleadingly light form of the poem. The vocabulary and rhythms which approximate to the colloquial simplicity of conversational speech, the frequently end-stopped lines, the repetitions which have the effect of mockingly counteracting the violence of the meaning, all establish the deliberately flippant note which this poem strives to achieve.

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Sharma, Kedar N. "Lady Lazarus by Sylvia Plath: Introduction" BachelorandMaster, 3 May 2014, bachelorandmaster.com/britishandamericanpoetry/lady-lazarus-introduction.html.