Lady Lazarus by Sylvia Plath (1962)

This poem is a bummer.

To be honest, I’m not a huge fan of Sylvia Plath. I have to be in exactly the right mindset to appreciate her stifling, dark words. I don’t want to read her when I’m already depressed because that only makes it worse, and I don’t want to read her when I’m feeling fine because it’ll just remind me that I have no right, ever, to be happy.

BUT. There’s a sweet spot in sadness—when you know it’s temporary, and you aren’t weakened by it; when it makes you more open to receive the heartache of others without tumbling over your own edge; when you achieve, as Edgar Allan Poe puts it, “that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible.” Though they are rare, there are times when I can really dig into a Plath Poem.

I chose Lady Lazarus because of one particular occasion. Like Plath, I’ve made some terrible relationship decisions (though none so bad as marrying Ted Hughes). In my early twenties, I found myself crying in my room after a fight with my Asshole Boyfriend. I had pulled out all my poetry collections and was flipping through them at random, and, on three separate occasions, from three different authors, I found allusions to Lazarus.

An aside: on this night, I blew my nose in a dryer sheet because I couldn’t be bothered to brave outside my room where the Asshole Boyfriend was in order to find a tissue. The dryer sheet got caught on my nose ring and made me bleed, and also dryer sheets are not absorbent.

ANYWAY, Lazarus is the dude who is responsible for the shortest verse in the (English translation of the) Bible: “Jesus wept.“ It is also, notably, the only instance of Jesus crying at all, which seems odd, considering that Mary Magdalene (Lazarus’s sister) washed his feet with her hair, and that had to tickle like a sonofabitch. Still, Lazarus’s death affected Jesus so deeply that, not only did he weep, he raised his friend from the dead.

I don’t remember which other two pieces I read that night that mentioned Lazarus, but I stopped reading altogether at Plath’s because it had given me what I needed. There’s a power to it. A threat, even. After reading that poem, it was a good thing that I didn’t venture out of my bedroom.

But not for my sake.

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TW: Suicide

Though she is not the first poet I have included in this series to die by suicide, Plath’s death has been inexorably linked to her life and works. I feel a certain responsibility to comment on this, especially as I have acknowledged the darkness of her poetry.

She did not become famous because of her death, or even because of her mental illness. In fact, had she lived, I’m certain she would have produced even more poetry, and it wouldn’t now be controlled by the Hughes estate. I wish that she’d felt like she had the resources to work through what she considered to be an inevitable descent into madness. Had she had access to therapy and medicine, and if our society were built to support people who suffer from mental illness, not only do I believe that she would have continued to produce poems as powerful as Lady Lazarus, I believe she would’ve transcended even her most prodigious accomplishments.

You do not have to punish yourself to be an artist. You don’t have to live with depression or anxiety or self-loathing or the fear of its onset to be one of The Greats. There is nothing romantic about taking a life. If you suffer from depression or suicidal ideation, please hear me: we need you, and we need your art. Do not take it from us.

If you’re struggling, here is a number you can call. You can also use the online chat service if you can’t call.

Short Stuff:

• Like my best friend Sharon Olds, Plath wrote in the ‘confessional’ style of poetry.
• She began writing poetry at the age of eight.
• She won the Pulitzer, posthumously, in 1982.

Topics

death & dying; resilience; depression; power

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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 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 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.
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 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 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
Beware
Beware.

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.

–Sylvia Plath

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If all you are is confused and curious about this poem, here is a wonderful analysis of it. It’s cheeky.