13-2 Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath’s poem represents the romanticism era. She was born in Boston Massachusetts. Plath writes of her mother and father personalities in her poems. At age seven-teen she published her first poem and her first short story. She went to Smith College on a scholarship. But she became filled with apprehension of horror and death. She was obsessed with isolation and entrapment. Unable to handle her inner and outer worlds she went to a hospital for treatment of which she later writes about by using false name of Victoria Lucas. The word “Lady” she uses with the title has to do with female power. In the poem Lady Lazarus is about being reborn and her resentment of those who care for her. She is frustrated at people’s inability to understand her despair and unwillingness to carry on with her life. Each time she recovers from her death actually from her suicide attempts she is overwhelmed by people that care about her as she returns to the same place she was when she died. I think Plath has an obsession with death but she is very frustrated when she wakes to the same place and same people. She wants to die and wake up somewhere else she thinks she is going to wake up at a different place and she doesn’t so she gets upset and tries to kill herself again. The end is where she rises out of ash from fire. She is on fire and she eats men like air but really it’s like fire where she devours them. Ash, ash you poke and stir everything is burned up where nothing is there. All has burned up. She sees dying is an art that she can’t quite capture to the extent that she can’t stop coming back to the same place.