The Lady Lazarus Analysis

Sylvia Plath was an American short-story writer, poet and novelist. She was born on October 27, 1932 to parents, Otto and Aurelia Plath, who lived in the Boston suburb of Jamaica Plain. Sylvia wrote her first poem at the age of eight, and the work was published in the Boston Herald. Sylvia started to keep journals beginning in 1944. This hobby became an important part of her life and helped people to understand Sylvia’s emotions after her death. In 1950 Sylvia won a scholarship and went to the Smith College. She also started to publish her works in national periodicals. The combination of work and studies created stressful conditions, and in 1953 Plath made her first suicide attempt with the aid of sleeping pills. She recovered from this nervous

The poem consists of 28 tree-line stanzas. The Lady Lazarus is a monologue. Rhymes do not appear in all stanzas and they are in no direct order. However, it is easy to read the poem because of stanza’s size and structure. Plath also used anaphora several times, where the interpretation of one expression depends on another expression. For example, it appears in lines 67 and 68: “I am your opus, I am your valuable” (Lady Lazarus).

The poem’s main character is a 30-year-old woman. Her age is mentioned in the 7th stanza. The woman tries to commit suicide every ten years. This is her third attempt and she will need to kill herself 6 more times, because the character has 9 lives, like a cat. The poem shows she is doing it in public now. Short stanzas make readers feel the narrator spits words onto them. Plath showed a negative attitude with the Nazi theme. Plath used appeals like “Herr Doctor” and a description of events in concentration camps to create an appropriate mood. She achieved her goal with short stanzas, like “a cake of soap, a wedding ring, a gold filling” (Lady Lazarus). These short sentences create a detailed picture of the poem’s