Explication of the poem "Lady Lazarus"

"Lady Lazarus" is one of Sylvia Plath's most horrifying poems. It requires a little bit of knowledge of the author herself, much like most of her poetry. Plath's confessional, autobiographical poems are the reason for her larger-than-life celebrity status in the writing world, made even more dramatic with the knowledge of her suicide and troubled marriage. “Lady Lazarus” is written about her suicide attempt, with allusions to her past brushes with death.

The first stanza begins with, "I have done it again --/One year in every ten/I manage it" - she's almost killed herself. Plath then goes on to describe herself (the speaker) as a "Nazi lampshade" with a "featureless" face of "Jew linen." Her references to the Holocaust perhaps are indicative of her feelings of being a prisoner within herself, or maybe her feelings of being a victim of the people trying to rescue her ("So, so Herr Doktor/ So, Herr Enemy").

In the way she describes herself in the poem, it's as if she is a rotten, walking corpse just waiting to die; her "sour breath will vanish in a day." The linen that hides her face (maybe a reference to a mask she puts on for daily living?) can be peeled back by her enemy (herself) to reveal her nose, eye "pits" and full set of teeth. It sounds to me like she's talking about a skull.
At this point I begin thinking that her audience for this poem was herself. It seems like she is directly addressing herself, as if there's some kind of inner demon she's trying to speak to. In an ironic, dark style she refers to her readers as the "peanut-crunching crowd" lining up to watch her misery as if it was some form of entertainment. They "unwrap" her "hand and foot -- / The big strip tease". It's like she's describing her dead body on the coroner's table, wrapped up in bags ready to be dissected by her admirers who see her as some sort of prodigy instead of a person.

"I may be skin and bone,/Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman." Is Plath trying to say she's dead inside, the same living as she is dead? Despite the references to death, "Lady Lazarus" is about a failed suicide attempt, about having to live on after having come so close to death. What tortures Sylvia, it seems, is not the act of suicide itself ("I do it exceptionally well ...It's easy enough to do it ... It's the theatrical/Comeback in broad day .../ That knocks me out." I think Plath is trying to say that she is comfortable with the idea of death, but the failure of dying and having to deal with "the same place, the same face, the same brute" afterwards is what really kills her.

The "same brute"? Could that be a direct reference to someone, or is she thinking more abstractly? Fans of Sylvia Plath who are knowledgeable about the whole drama that caused her suicide (her poet husband, Ted Hughes, had an affair with her friend) would claim that she is referring to her husband. The last stanza in the poem goes like this: "Out of the ash/I rise with my red hair/And I eat men like air." This would be a good argument in favor of those who view Sylvia Plath as a feminist icon. She has risen, like a phoenix, using the feminine vulnerability in her poetry to force the world to acknowledge her ignored position as a depressed woman.
The heavy subject matter of this poem is rendered a little more bearable with the light, ironic tone in which Plath discusses her suicide. To some people, this conversational, anti-climactic discussion of her many suicide attempts is the most horrifying aspect of the poem. In this poem, she is mocking the drama with which her life is received by her readers, and the god-like status she attained in the world of literature. "For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge." She is "your opus," "the pure gold baby/That melts into a shriek." For Sylvia Plath, being a poetic mastermind is not very fun.