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.

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