My
last paper is about Silvia Plath, I read some information about her and then
some poems. Finally I decide to analyze a poem from her book Ariel
called Lady Lazarus.
“Plath
has been criticized for her controversial allusions to the Holocaust, and is known
for her uncanny use of metaphor. Her work has been compared to and associated
with Anne Sexton, W.D. Snodgrass, and other confessional poets”.
“The
poems in Ariel mark a departure from her earlier work into a more personal
arena of poetry. The impact of Ariel was dramatic, with its maudlin
descriptions of mental illness in pseudo-autobiographical poems such as
"Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus".”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Plath
Section: Sylvia Plath
Home: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
“Ariel is
the second book which is published, in 1965, two years after her death by
suicide; most of the poems included in it had been selected by her. It has been
the cause of much controversy among feminist critics. The version that was
published was similar but not identical: some poems were trimmed to reduce what
her husband Ted Hughes considered to be redundancy, and additional poems
composed in her final weeks were added to the manuscript.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariel_%28Plath%29
Section: Ariel
Home: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
“ "Lady
Lazarus" is commonly used as an example of her writing style. The poem is
dark and ironic, yet confessional. The title is a religious allegory that compares
Plath to the Biblical Lazarus. This reference becomes evident in the context of
the poem as Plath describes how she dies and is resurrected like Lazarus. Plath
speaks of her suicide attempts in the poem, which can be compared to the
illness that killed Lazarus. She also speaks of the suicides as if they are put
on public display. She also uses several Nazi images, which have led many to
call Lady Lazarus a companion poem to "Daddy". This poem is one of
American Poetries most celebrated. ”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Lazarus
Section: Lady
Lazarus
Home: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
Lady Lazarus
I
have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it-----
A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot
A paperweight,
My featureless, fine
Jew linen.
Peel off the napkin
O my enemy.
Do I terrify?-------
The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.
Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me
And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.
This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.
What a million filaments.
The Peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see
Them unwrap me hand and foot ------
The big strip tease.
Gentleman , ladies
These are my hands
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,
Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.
The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut
As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.
Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I've a call.
It's easy enough to do it in a cell.
It's easy enough to do it and stay put.
It's the theatrical
Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:
'A miracle!'
That knocks me out.
There is a charge
For the eyeing my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart---
It really goes.
And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood
Or a piece of my hair on my clothes.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.
I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby
That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.
Ash, ash---
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there----
A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.
Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.
Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.
Section: Poem
Analysis
Home: http://www.sylviaplathforum.com/
In my
opinion, I cut this poem in seven parts. The first one is the tree first
lines, in which she present or show us the situation. The second cut is
from line four to twenty-one in which se present herself
to us describing her body and face. The third cut is from line
twenty-two to twenty four in which she came back to her situation, telling us
that this is the third time that she try to kill herself. The forth cut is from
line twenty-five to thirty-six in which she came back to describe herself. The
fifth cut is from line thirty-seven to forty-eight in which she talked about
her personal history and her vision about the death. The sixth part is from
line forty-nine to seventy-three in which she talks about the death. This is
the longest part I thinks, in this she called to two personificate
words (doctor and Enemy). And the last part is which I called the life cycle.
The main
themes in this poem are obviously her attempts of suicide and her mental
illness. Although, there are another theme, the influence of
the Holocaust and the German repression.
It seems
that her attempts have now (the moment that she is writing the poem) become a
show, an act that she performs very well. She knows how worried they are but she
burns like a phoenix, and although she is ash, leaving little to remember her
by, she warns both God and the Devil, which could merely represent faith, she
refers to them as "Herr", oppressors, her enemy, she warns them that
she will rise again and will "eat men like air" she will go on
living, wreaking havoc just as before, because although she may try to die, although
she may get close "like a cat" she has "nine times to die."
The
speaker orchestrates every aspect of her show, attempting to undermine the
power an audience would normally have over her. She controls her body, instead
of being a passive object of other eyes.
Because
she was German the helplessness and powerless of the Holocaust victims are
referenced her in her attempt to surface from the horror of human trauma.
The poem
isn't really telling a story, but is one representative image after another.
A
propulsive quality in the poem is contributed by the assonances (all, call,
well, hell, real, call, cell, theatrical) and the tercets,
their succinctness adding to an inevitable motion towards the end. The
repetitions also give her speech an incantatory quality.
Ř If I have to answer the question where
is here the love and worship of nature, maybe I say that in this poem the
Nature is her life, this thing that she has not care of it. The thing that she
thought that is not important to miss, and because of this she attempts to her
life. I can’t find any thing from the Nature but I think that she make a
comparison between her life and a cat’s life, because she try to suicide three
time until now, but one in each decade, leaving to think that she thinks maybe
thinks to try again some other time, perhaps until she arrives at seven times
as a cat.
Academic
year 2006/2007
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Carmen Mora Vives
mamovi3@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de Valčncia Press