Lady Lazarus

I was eighteen when I came across Sylvia Plath’s “Ariel”. It was my first serious contact with contemporary poetry.

By and large, poetry was then off my radar.  I was more drawn to fiction.  Still I was struck by the power of Plath’s poems, especially “Lady Lazarus”, which contains such lines as young people without any life insurance are fond of quoting:

Dying

Is an art, like everything else.

I do it exceptionally well.

Lacking sophistication, I thought them rather odd, until I learned that Plath herself made several suicide attempts, the last one being finally successful.

It’s difficult to explain “Lady Lazarus”. It unravels on several frequencies.  I take it as a person’s reaction to the people’s thinking about her (not necessarily Plath’s own) desire, so far thwarted, to take her own life. The poem refers to the last attempt being her third — the first, when she was ten, was accidental; the second, at age twenty, was an apparent suicide try. It seems that this thing — whatever it was, mental illness or depression, and its attendant death wish — happens every ten years.

Plath’s images are shockingly pink, evincing her courage in tackling suicide, a normally taboo subject. For instance, she refers to her skin as “[b]right as a Nazi lampshade,” evoking the supposed Nazi practice of using human skin as lamp covers.  Aside from this, the Holocaust comes to mind when she calls her right foot “[m]y featureless, fine / Jew linen,” and uses the honorific “Herr” — “Herr Doktor,” “Herr Gott,” Herr Lucifer.”

She calls herself “Lady Lazarus” because in a way she has risen from the dead, in that she has been three times within an inch of her life — so far she has failed to die, most probably on account of insufficient skill or sufficient medical intervention.  Her periodic “resurrection”, which has become a freak show, she credits to what she calls her many lives, like the cat, as well as to her being somewhat like the phoenix of myth, which burns itself on a funeral pyre and rises from the ashes with renewed vigor.

The real Lazarus in the Gospel of John was a close friend of Jesus, as were his sisters, Martha and Mary.  Lazarus died while Jesus was away and was four days in the tomb when Jesus returned.  Martha told Jesus, “If you had been here, my brother would not have died, but I know that, even now, whatever you ask of God, he will grant you.”  Jesus replied, “Your brother will rise again.”  Martha said, “I know he will rise again on the last day.”  And then Jesus gave one of the most memorable statements in the New Testament, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, even though he dies, will live, and whoever lives and believes in me will never die.”  John writes that, when Jesus saw Martha’s sister Mary and the others in tears, and asked to see Lazarus’ body, “Jesus wept.”

He then asked that the stone covering the tomb be removed, and after praying to the Father, that the people may believe that it was the Father who had sent him, cried in a loud voice, “Lazarus, here!  Come out!”  The dead man came out, “his feet and hands still bound with bands of stuff and a cloth round his face.”  “Unbind him, let him go free,” Jesus said.

Lazarus was the beneficiary of a demonstration of Jesus’ power over life, which when snuffed out he could restore.  Lazarus’ rising from the dead was not yet the resurrection that would happen to all at the end of time, for which Lazarus had to die again.  His rising was for the benefit of those who refused or were reluctant to believe.
“Lady Lazarus” was Plath’s statement of disdain for what people thought of her suicide attempts, baiting them to persist in their attitude with a promise to repeat the act.

Except for the appropriation of the name Lazarus for its title, Plath’s poem hardly has anything in common with that great event, the raising of Lazarus in John’s Gospel.

In fact, it misuses the name, which it finds convenient to describe a woman with a propensity to self-destruct.  Still I can understand why the Women’s Lib movement might find the last lines very anthemic:

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

For me “eat men like air”, aside from its gratuitous misandry, its last word being a convenient rhyming match, reeks of precipitation.  It manducates its own lightness, an act which to me causes its own death, and being no Lazarus, rather than rise, it must needs fall — like rain.

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