Lady Lazarus

By Sylvia Plath

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 face a 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 breathWill vanish in a day.

Soon, soon the fleshThe 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 trashTo 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. Gentlemen, 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 meantTo last it out and not come back at all. I rocked shut

As a seashell.They had to call and callAnd pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

DyingIs 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 dayTo the same place, the same face, the same brute Amused shout:

‘A miracle!’That knocks me out. There is a charge

For the eyeing of 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 or 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 BewareBeware.

Out of the ashI rise with my red hairAnd I eat men like air.

The Greatest Show on Earth

The two most famous facts about Sylvia Plath are these: that she was a poet and that she

killed herself. Her struggles with depression (which led her to attempt suicide more than once)

inform much of her work, including her autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, published

posthumously in 1963. And yet, such facts oversimplify her art. In “Lady Lazarus,” written in

1962, four months before her death, and published in the collection Ariel two years after her

death, Plath transforms her suicidal past into a poetic performance that transcends the mere facts

of her life. Branding herself “Lady Lazarus,” a sort of stage name that both elevates and

degrades her, the poem’s speaker asserts her power and reveals her powerlessness. At once

Holocaust victim and menacing aggressor, smiling wife and threatening artist, the speaker

describes how she uses her suicidal acts of self-destruction to entertain a mesmerized audience

while, at the same time, her audience consumes her. As the poem unfolds, the speaker shrinks the

audience to a male tormentor whom she confronts. Throughout most of the poem’s 28 three-line

stanzas, the speaker shifts between the roles of master manipulator and passive object; indeed, at

times the roles collapse into each other so that readers grapple with the paradoxical idea that the

source of the speaker’s power is her victimization. It is not until the poem’s last two stanzas that

the speaker breaks free of the cycle she has described. Rather than a new female Lazarus, a still-

mortal being controlled by a masculine figure (a Jesus who raises her from the dead), she

becomes the mythic Phoenix, an all-powerful non-binary figure that resurrects itself. By ending

with the Phoenix, the speaker throws off her victimhood and asserts her superhuman, unalloyed

power that triumphs over her male oppressors. At the same time, Plath breaks her readers out of

the paradox she has enacted by allowing them to rise with her.

On its own, the first stanza of “Lady Lazarus” tells readers very little, but taken with the

poem’s provocative title, in which the speaker identifies herself as a public performer who rises

from the dead like the biblical Lazarus, readers are better able to tap into the complexities of

Plath’s creation right from the start. The title yokes together two worlds: the scam world of stage

magic and the divine, the fake and the authentic. This ambiguity makes the “it” of the poem’s

first line – “I have done it again” (1) – something of a head-scratcher. The speaker announces her

singular accomplishment, but the ambiguities of this first line belie the nature of that

accomplishment. Readers can’t know for sure whether the “it” the speaker has done “again” is

something to be admired or not. They only know that she has done “it.” The next lines (“One

year in every ten/I manage it” (2-3)) provide little clarification. At best, readers get the idea that

what happens is a routine, happening once every ten years. They also tune into the speaker’s odd

combination of modesty and self-control: “manage” suggests both something barely achieved

and something the speaker directs, as a kind of stage manager. This last – the sense of something

“managed” -- invites readers to reflect back on the title. If the speaker is “Lady Lazarus,” then

the “it” she at once manages to do and stage-manages is her resurrection, a rising from the dead

that is simultaneously a trick and a miracle.

The second stanza opens with the same combination of modesty and triumph which

leaves readers wondering whether they should be astonished by or blasé in the face of the

speaker’s accomplishment. The speaker doesn’t insist that she is a walking miracle but only “a

sort of walking miracle” (4), which seems at best half-hearted. However, this tension between

the miraculous and the mundane does not prepare readers for the role the speaker next assumes,

that of the Holocaust survivor whose skin the Nazis stripped off to produce a lampshade. Using

these shocking metaphors, the speaker inhabits the role not of the powerful figure who can “do it

again” but of the most powerless, anonymous victim, a figure whose body the Nazis appropriate

to turn into objects for their own use – a lampshade, a paperweight, a piece of cloth. Anatomized,

the speaker has no control over her own body. Moreover, she is “Featureless” (8) and a “Jew” (9)

indistinguishable from other Jews. In short, she loses her individuality. This Lady Lazarus

returns to the living world in pieces, a fact the speaker emphasizes by putting the elements on

separate lines. She may be “fine,” but her fineness only exists to serve others, for their comfort,

not her own. Returned to the world, she can do no more than light the way for her captors.

Or perhaps she can do much more. The next stanza begins with a command which no

mere victim would dare to voice. “Peel off the napkin” (10), the speaker announces, signaling to

readers that she has something her oppressors need: the spectacle of her suffering which only she

can perform. The imperfect internal rhyme of “skin,” “linen,” and “napkin” reminds readers that

the “enemy” has appropriated her outer layer for its own uses, and yet beneath these surfaces

(skin, linen, napkin) lies that which the world craves and is terrified by. The poetic apostrophe –

“O my enemy” (11) – brings the speaker and the enemy into an unexpectedly intimate

relationship where the speaker wields significant power. The enemy is “my” enemy, a pronoun

which oddly signals the speaker’s possession of this antagonistic force whose sole goal is

exploitation. The act of exposing the speaker’s pain paradoxically gives the speaker the upper

hand, and her taunting question (“Do I terrify?” (12)) makes the enemy seems so much smaller

in the readers’ eyes, as if the speaker is saying, “O poor little enemy, am I making you afraid?”

The speaker dares the enemy to disagree with her, all the more confident that they will do no

such thing. When the enemy does as they are bid and peels off the napkin, like a good magician’s

assistant should, they reveal something truly terrifying: “The nose, the eye pits, the full set of

teeth” (13). The speaker does indeed have the power to make them quake in their blood-stained

Nazi boots.

The speaker even has the power to reassure the sniveling enemy that her offensively

“sour breath,” (14) – a consequence of having been dead – will eventually “vanish in a day” (15),

another part of this amazing magic act that Lady Lazarus performs; however, this almost parental

reassurance (don’t worry, the speaker says, it will be gone soon) then foregrounds her own

disempowerment, as she returns to the conventionality of female domesticity. When the sour

breath vanishes, and the flesh returns to the body, the speaker loses her capacity to terrify. Lines

16-18 (“Soon, soon the flesh/The grave cave ate/Will be at home on me”) give agency to the

flesh and the “grave cave” but not to the speaker herself. The stanza as a whole has a children’s

book-like quality, with its long vowels (soon, soon), Dr. Seuss-ish internal rhymes (“grave cave

ate”) and monosyllabic vocabulary, suggesting the movement from the other-worldly “grave

cave” to the unthreatening, domesticated routine of “home.” Plath completes the image of the

speaker’s disempowerment by returning the speaker to the form of “the smiling woman” (19)

who has no choice but to embody domesticity: like the flesh itself, this smile is slapped on her.

The speaker still performs – here she is, the happy wife! –, but no more is she the great

performer with the ability to conquer a great enemy set on extermination. Instead she can only

watch and smile as she returns to life again and again.

“I am only thirty” (20), this smiling woman announces in the next line, and while at first

such a line might suggest the celebration of youth (she’s only thirty) and a long life to come, the

speaker means no such thing. On the contrary, in the next line, she declares that “like the cat I

have nine times to die” (21). In a stroke of poetic virtuosity, Plath turns the cliché of the cat with

nine lives on its head. This speaker’s power lies not in the opportunities to escape death and live

life to the fullest but rather in the opportunities to escape life, the life of the smiling woman.

Indeed, in the next stanza, the speaker expands this vision of death as liberation, noting her

power to “trash” and “annihilate” whole decades at a time. The tone suggests the freedom she

feels in her ability to throw herself away, to escape (as it were) time itself. Her voice produces

no trace of guilt or regret: in fact, the reckless energy of the lines suggests how much pleasure

she takes in the power she has to destroy herself.

While “trash” might evoke the idea that the speaker throws her life away because it has

no value, the situation is not so simple. When the speaker echoes this line (“What a trash” (23))

in “What a million filaments” (25) two lines later, she transforms herself into something at once

broken and beautiful. The image puts the reader in mind of a shattered mirror or light bulb with

its delicate, slender shards, broken beyond repair but still lovely to look at. The line’s alliteration

produces a beautiful sound: though shattered, the speaker remains attractive, and indeed she does

attract quite an audience, though that audience is much less appealing. They are the vulgar

“peanut-crunching crowd” that chaotically “Shoves in to see” (27) the main event. Here the

speaker imagines herself as superior to these gawkers. While they are the uncouth masses who

only care about their own entertainment in the moment, the speaker becomes this magnificent

performer who can captivate the masses, their peanut-filled open mouths agape at the sight of her

delicate beauty.

Still, the speaker remains a subject who only gains her power by being objectified -- a

spectacle in the eyes of the crowd she despises. Harkening back to line 10 (“Peel off the

napkin”), the speaker describes her unveiling by some unnamed “them” who “unwrap[s] me

hand and foot——” (28). Here again Plath yokes together the speaker’s power and her

powerlessness. By rewriting the common idiom (wait on me hand and foot), she becomes both

the master who is waited on and the helpless victim whose wounded body is exposed for all to

see. The act of mastery and the act of exposure become one, so much so that she announces her

own objectification in “Gentlemen, ladies / These are my hands / My knees” (30-32). Here the

speaker is both completely in control of the situation and helpless like a mummy in an Egyptian

exhibit.

By now, savvy readers have caught on to the pattern of power and powerlessness that

Plath has established in the poem. And so, when, she declares that “Nevertheless, I am the same,

identical woman” (34) in the eleventh stanza, readers are prepared to understand that the smiling

woman, the Holocaust victim, the circus performer, the object, the threatening corpse are all one

and the same. What readers are not prepared for is the major shift in the poem which takes them

back in time to before the performance ever existed or was even planned. The childlike, non-

performative tone of “The first time it happened I was ten. / It was an accident” (35-6) sounds

different from anything else in the poem. The earnest simplicity of the lines catches readers by

surprise, as do the following lines in which the speaker confesses that “The second time [she]

meant / To last it out and not come back at all” (37-8). The shift from accident to intentional act

signals not a desire to perform but a desire to withdraw completely, once and for all. And then

the lovely, natural imagery Plath produces when she describes how the speaker “rocked shut /As

a seashell” (39-40) breaks from the artificiality of all that has come before. This is no act.

Instead, Plath represents a shutting away that allows for privacy. Tellingly, the speaker wants

readers to know that she almost made it but for those who open the shell “And pick the worms

off [her] like sticky pearls” (42). The transformation of worms into pearls calls to mind the

naturalness of this process. Bodies do become food for worms, and those natural processes are

right and good; however, those around her seek to harvest her, like those who want pearls that

the oyster produces.

The abrupt shift in lines 43-45 (“Dying/ Is an art, like everything else / I do it

exceptionally well”) from the past to the present, from the pre-history of Lady Lazarus to her

current incarnation, reveals the complexity of Plath’s aesthetic. Plath gives “Dying” its own line,

and it is the only one-word line in the whole poem. The word carries a special power, and

connecting it so explicitly to art and to her mastery of this art invites readers to imagine that they

are reading about Plath herself, the poet of depression and suicide. By the time she wrote “Lady

Lazarus,” Plath had already established herself as a confessional poet, a part of a movement of

writers including Plath’s husband Ted Hughes, Robert Lowell, and Anne Sexton (Gill 3-4).

These writers sought to break away from the school of poets who, following T.S. Eliot’s lead,

wanted to create a so-called impersonal poetry that separated “the man who suffers from the

mind which creates” (T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” qtd. in Gill 4). And yet, at

the same time, Plath suggests that turning the act of dying into art requires more than merely the

bearing of one’s soul. After all, she is creating something, and she does it so well that “it feels

like hell” (46) and “feels real” (47). Notice the simile. What she creates feels “like” hell” but

isn’t hell. It “feels real” but isn’t real. Plath makes something different out of her experience. For

instance, throughout the poem, Plath employs internal and end-rhyme to produce some startling

effects: “Gentleman, Ladies/These are my hands/My knees (30-2) offers the rhyme “Ladies …

knees” to imitate the ringmaster’s patter and emphasize the objectification of women’s bodies.

Just as other great artists transform their experiences, so too does Plath. She is no mere

transcriber. Although the speaker rather modestly suggests that she has a calling (“I guess you

could say I’ve a call” (48)), Plath rightly implies that she too has a vocation. Those who brought

her back from the dead had to “call and call,” but she had the power to turn those calls into a

calling of her own. In retrospect, the speaker now sees her first attempts at suicide as amateurish

and dismisses them as “easy.” The mature artist-of-death knows that the challenge is to make

something amazing of one’s suffering; thus, Lady Lazarus is born.

The speaker enacts the complexity of her mature art in lines 51-56, where she describes

what distinguishes her from those amateurs who just stay put in their cells (as she once did):

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. (51-56)

Here the speaker reiterates her power to display what those others couldn’t “manage” (to borrow

a word from the poem’s first stanza). Still, the repetition of “same” qualifies her accomplishment

because it expresses tedium: neither she nor her audience has changed. Nevertheless, the act

itself evokes the audience’s amusement and her pleasure in their amusement. Granted, that

pleasure sounds sadomasochistic: she is both abused by the brute audience and thrilled by their

voyeurism. That Plath combines the miraculous and the degraded, the religious vocation and the

debased theatricality of sideshow performing enacts her ability to do what she does

“exceptionally well” (44).

No doubt the speaker pays for the thrill she feels, but she insists that her viewers (and by

extension, her readers) pay as well: “There is a charge” (57), she announces not once but twice,

and the demand for compensation provokes readers to think about what it costs them to be an

audience for this art form. What do readers have to pay for witnessing another’s pain turned into

art? If readers simply want the souvenirs — a “piece of my hair or my clothes” (64) —, then, of

course, they are no better than the “peanut-crunching crowd.” Plath seems to be asking her

readers how (or whether) they can separate themselves from “Herr Doktor” (65) or “Herr

Enemy” (66) or the “peanut-crunching crowd” (26). For them to do so, they must find a different

way of seeing the art Plath creates.

As Plath turns the corner and moves into the last five stanzas of the poem, she liberates

herself and, I would argue, her readers from the paradox she has established. Shrinking the

audience in the poem to the malignant and explicitly masculine “Herr Doktor” who is also “Herr

Enemy” (“Herr” thus identifying them as male), the speaker both concedes that she is his

possession but, having done so, uses that objectification to her own advantage. The explicitness

of “I am your opus, / I am your valuable” (67-8) sets the stage for her most thrilling

transformation yet. Like the Nazis who melted down the gold fillings of their victims, Herr

Doktor melts down the speaker until she becomes no more than an infant who can only shriek in

pain, but the Doktor fails to see that this process empowers her. The voice returns, and the

threatening tone of “I turn and burn” (71) (as if to say, “I turn on you and burn with fury”) and

the sarcasm of “Do not think I underestimate your great concern” (72) foreground not the return

of the “same identical woman” but of something utterly different: the Phoenix.

Having consigned her to flames, Herr Enemy is left to try to find her among the ashes to retrieve

his valuable prize, and, tellingly the speaker eludes not just any specific man but rather the

patriarchal oppressor embodied in the categories of Herr Doktor, Herr God, and Herr Lucifer. All

the now-helpless masculine figure can do is “poke and stir” (74) in search of the prize he

depended on -- the “pure gold baby” (689), the performer with the “eye pits, the full set of teeth”

(13). Now there is nothing to reveal to the crowd, but what is left is not without some value: “A

cake of soap, /A wedding ring, /A gold filling” (76-8). Readers might recognize these objects as

associated with both Holocaust victims (the Nazis removed rings and fillings from victims, and

after the war some historians asserted that soap was made from corpses) and the smiling wives

that the speaker connects herself to earlier in the poem. On the one hand, Herr Enemy has

reduced her to these objects. On the other hand, she herself -- her essence -- is nowhere to be

found, poke though Herr Enemy will. Here is her greatest disappearing act to date. And readers

are left to ask themselves, “Will she return? And if so, how?” Only her voice remains, warning

“Herr God, Herr Lucifer” (79) that they should “Beware. / Beware” (80-1). Pairing God and

Lucifer in the same line emphasizes how little difference there is between these two biblical

figures in the speaker’s view: both emerge from the same patriarchal Judeo-Christian tradition

that consign women to servitude in one way or another. Now the speaker takes on not just a male

tormentor but [male] culture itself.

The speaker’s final transformative act allows her to transcend patriarchal traditions by

aligning her resurrection with the mythic instead of the biblical. The name “Lady Lazarus”

invokes the biblical story of Lazarus whom Christ resurrected from the dead. Both the biblical

Lazarus and the poetic “Lady Lazarus” depend on others. Lady Lazarus needs the enemy who

peels off the linen as well as the amused crowd that “knocks [her] out” (56). However, when the

speaker rises “Out of the ash” (82) in the poem’s last stanza, she needs nothing and no one -- not

even an audience -- to stupefy. There’s no crowd here, just the readers with whom she shares this

moment. Readers see her not as one consumed by a crowd that takes its bloody souvenirs but a

transcendent figure that consumes oppressors. Instead of feathers, this Phoenix has red hair, the

color and shape evoking flame itself. The end-rhymes of “beware/hair/air” emphasize all the

more the movement from threat (beware) to flame (hair) to ascendance (air). The poem’s last

line, “And I eat men like air” (84), suggests how easy the speaker finds this new life. What could

be easier than eating air? “Air” connotes freedom of movement and even, perhaps, relief: saying

the word moves readers to exhale.

At the end of the poem, Plath gives readers almost nothing tangible to see. Other than her

red hair, readers must imagine this new Phoenix rising out of the ashes. The material objects

disappear as do the scars and all other signs of suffering. While one might argue that Plath

presents the Phoenix as just another role that the speaker inhabits, along with Holocaust victim,

smiling woman, wife, sideshow performer, and suicide-attempter, such an argument does an

injustice to the uniqueness of the poem’s final image. Emerging as the Phoenix, she sheds all

other roles to become a symbol of immortality, unburdened by the past and ascending into a

boundless future.

Works Cited

Gill, Joanna. “‘My Sweeney, Mr. Eliot: Anne Sexton and the 'Impersonal Theory of Poetry,'.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 27, no. 1, 2003, pp. 36–56., doi:10.1353/jml.2004.0055.