Wednesday, March 26, 2008
lady laz
I like the poem “lady Lazarus” also especially because my dorm is Lazarus. Plath’s poem creates vivid imagery, yet the images jump from one picture to another. For example, in the beginning of the poem Plath transforms into a “Jew” with her “face a featureless, fine Jew linen.” I think Plath evokes the image of the oppressed Jew in the Nazi era because she wants the reader to equate her suffering on the grand scale of those who endured the Holocaust. Also, the idea of the phoenix rising from the pyre is the ending image of the poem through “I rise with my red hair.” This symbol parallels with the Jew image as various concentration camps burned people to ashes. Yet, in Plath’s poem, “Lady Lazarus” grows from being killed in the ashes to rising “out of the ash.” Moreover, Lady Lazarus is compared to a “cat” “And like the cat (she) has nine times to die.” Plath’s images are carefully constructed to covey that “Dying is an art.” The entire poem is structured around Lady Lazarus enduring a kind of metamorphosis from one image to another.
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So from the footnotes of both poems, I learned that Lazarus was brought back from the dead by Jesus. That being said, it's appropriate that Plath's poem would be titled "Lady Lazarus" as she talks about dying and yet still living. What struck me (apart, of course, from the Holocaust images) was that when Plath speaks about how dying is an art and she has nine lives, the image I constructed in my head was one of her attempting suicide. I know that Plath eventually did commit suicide, but she states early in the poem that she is 30 and that she has "died" three times. She even says that the first time was accidental when she was 10. I wonder how much of this poem is biographical.
As people have mentioned there is a lot of language refering to resurrection or rebirth (i.e. the bibilical lazarus reference, the cat with nine lives, etc.) One thing I thought was interesting concerning this theme of ressurection is the way Plath portrays it. She refers to miracles, but almost sardonically. This is clear in her comparison of her skin to a "nazi lampshades" made of human skin. She "has done it again" (encountered death) and has been "miraculously" (horribly) remade, just as the Nazi's remade the skin of their victims into lampshades. This same idea recurs later in the poem:
"Ash, Ash --
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there --
A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling."
These are the items left after the burning of their owners bodies in the Nazi concentration camps. The ash was remade into soap.
As for the autobiographical content of the poem, Plath attempted suicide ("The second time I meant / To last it out and not come back at all.") The reference to the "grave cave" implies Jesus' burial place, as well as Plath's intended suicide. She took a lot of pills and crawled into a "cave" in her basement (a dark dirt shelf under the porch) in hopes that no one would find her, and was there for many days. She didn't attemt suicide in her early youth (when she was 10) as far as I know, but her father died around that time, and that may be the encounter with death she refers to,or maybe she had some near fatal accident then.
I think the main idea of the poem is that Plath sees herself as a dead woman walking.
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