Lady Lazarus
by
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 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 in foot ------ The big strip tease. Gentleman , 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 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 on 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. (1962)
Plath's fascination with death (since reading The Bell Jar) always makes me realize so much about Life itself. How our minds are born with the nurturing of some haunts more than others and how the activities and things we think on feed them, encourage them and make those thoughts thrive. She thought on death so very often and encouraged it thoroughly and with so much craft, as she mentions "dying is an art" in itself. So many of these thoughts are so foreign to my mind...I very much do not think on dying very often if at all. So many of my habits surround life, but I suppose, to think on death, to battle with the "enemy" as she battled is, in fact, to also think on life.
ReplyDeleteIn this poem you can feel so much of the struggle she went through- back and forth from mocking to reality in death and life. She mocks even Lucifer himself. Who, I wonder did she ever feel like she belonged to? If not the light, if not the dark....
I looked up the poem after reading it. I missed the Phoenix reference. The rebirth as the Phoenix is to solidify her next suicide attempt. Such an ironic idea: living to die. All the doctors that save her are her enemies, like the Nazis.
ReplyDeleteWow! The Phoenix. What a visual here- I missed this definition as well! Your comment on doctor as Nazis made me wonder about Plath's cultural background. And it turns out...that "Her mother, Aurelia Schober Plath (1906–1994), was a second-generation American of Austrian descent, and her father, Otto Plath (1885–1940), was from Grabow, Germany." I wonder if any of her tendency towards this type of mental health was genetic or in somewhat in spite of her parents in any way?
DeleteThey didn't release The Bell Jar in the states because Plath didn't want her family to read it, but they ended up releasing it. I thought Plath was was Jewish, but I can't confirm in a few quick searches. Her dad was a Nazi solider. We will have to read her poem "Daddy."
DeleteI think all mental illness is at least partially genetic. But too many factor to pinpoint.
What goes on inside the mind as genetic? Sometimes I feel there is far to much in this world for us to account for. If you think to long about how one minute builds upon the next and the past minute before that and on into the hours of our parents before them and our children after us is gets a little bit confusing. Maybe one day our minds will balance out into something just Marvelous with a little bit of it all put into one great Thing. Until then, I suppose we can just keep writing poems...
DeleteAJ comment from 2018 (this poem was posted twice)
ReplyDeleteAllie DreadfulwaterSeptember 13, 2018 at 1:01 PM
This is probably the most dark of the poetry of hers I have read while getting to the root of her obsessions with death, dying and attempts...visions everywhere of each possibility. It is so hard to read some of these lines...its like she wanted the world to know how her mind worked without asking for any help at all. She committed suicide in February of 1963- just 4 short months after this poem was written after multiple previous attempts. She states in this poem that "dying is like an art" but it's almost as if it were the idea of dying instead, the process, that entwined her so since after multiple attempts...she kept allowing life. They say that Plath's writing and clinical depression paved the way for many others...it makes me feel the differences between sympathy and empathy. I get so mad at a majority of her comments, provoked...because you don't see room for any hope. It's amazing to see someone use their writing skills for such work versus other poets who find their motives upon a more positive and life-changing course...hers was a death-changing course. I wonder if reading her work would really help other people with clinical depression?
Her poems leave me speechless. The way ideas flow and how she addresses the reader, God, a doctor, etc. I love the rhymed lines with well and hell. Those two lines break up the poem, and then the poem is charged up with the repetition and use of her charge.
ReplyDeleteThe devil and God need to beware, damn. That's set up so well.
And I as well. What made you begin reading The Bell Jar just recently?
DeleteNot sure exactly. I've been wanting to read it. I think I was curious about teaching it, that probably wouldn't have been an option.
DeleteWhen I look at checking it out from the library, I saw Maggie Gyllenhaal read the audiobook, so I waited to read and listen to her recording.
We have spoke before about the choosing of books. It is one of my most thoughtful subjects of choice, in fact. Why they are there when we need them the most or there when we don’t need them at all??? In what order we read them on which particular day that crossing over into which emotion and circumstance and hour- all the while living their lives as if ours depended on it!!!! Books are a whole world.
Delete