Sylvia Plath’s Lady Lazurus is a Once in a Generation Masterpiece: Here’s How She Did It

By Stuti Jain, Trailblazer Blog Writer

“Herr lucifer, Herr God, beware, beware,” Sylvia chants. With this one line, you are drawn into a world marked, almost pointedly, with the absence of light, with an unsettling, unbearable darkness, with a fear that you are not fully able to explain, as you journey through the piece. There is a sense of chill, of horrifying manipulation, a feeling of actual inhumanness that makes you want to turn and run.

This is not a horror poem, in its truest sense, though it utilizes horror as its driving aid. It’s a description, a confession, tender and soft at its very heart, sorrowful. 

My mind is a trap, she seems to say, not bothering to ask for the help she knows she is beyond. My mind is a horror show. 

A truthfulness that makes it one of the most chilling poems of the 20th century.

You seem to almost visualize it, navigating through the jagged lines and edges of the poem, each one almost cutting with its intensity. “I have done it again,” Plath nearly snarls, as readers open the piece, maneuvering through every line and strangely emotionless shot. Throughout the darkness, there seems to be a burning light, a sense of hope riddled with anguish, even grief, as Plath herself knows she will lose it in the end.

Though often thought of as a poem about suicide, the reality of the piece could better be interpreted as a dissertation on life, installing in it’s readers a deep sense of unsettlement- fear, even- towards modern life, a lurking sense of disturbance… Plath descends on a tirade, one blessed with the absurd contradiction of both burning anger and a strange numbness.

Perhaps this is the reality of the poem, the true driving factor, the scorching tension between feeling everything and feeling nothing at all. Plath herself says, “perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously near to wanting nothing.” She herself seems to be aware this is no longer a journey of life but of survival, of a body fighting to live and a mind yet wanting to die, an inherent discontinuity between mind and body..a juxtaposition between stasis and movement. 

There is a scorching, smothering heat to her words, a burning anguish, an ode to destruction and terror. It is with a matter-of-fact tone that she recalls her own annihalation, her own torture of sorts, her own pain, as if she were an omnipresent narrator and the person she is writing a poem about. Indeed, she is so far removed from her sorrow, and from her existence itself, that she leaves the impression of something to be missed, something already gone, visible to the reader. There is no appeal to the reader, no appeal to the compassion of the readers.. leading to the unsettling conclusion that perhaps.. there isn’t one. A scathing analysis of the reality of life: the grim comedy, the bitter satire, the dark humour, it all serves a nihilistic purpose. Almost like a sad, funny, what’s the point? She asks questions, questions she knows she won’t get an answer to. The poem itself seems an explanation from beyond the grave- inconclusive and elusive- after all, does violence ever really have an explanation?

Yet, it is perhaps what is not said, or visible, the strange tinge of mania lurking beyond the edges that really drive the horror of the piece. With the detachment of one who has experienced pain beyond the human, Plath’s name checking of the Nazi’s in the very beginning of the piece makes the bones shiver. This is the inherent nature of humanity, she seems to say, they show humanity’s inevitable truth. After all, the most unsettling part of the Holocaust, if one can be found, is the simplicity of it, the sheer adaptability we seem to have to violence and cruelty. The evil of this world, Plath believes, is not an impurity or a flaw but an inseparable cruelty, an evil perhaps central and foundational to our nature. 

Plath compares herself to a Jew, not racially, not religiously, but because she identifies with the knowledge that she will inevitably wind up dead*, with the knowledge that the world is inherently built to destroy her. Do I terrify, she asks her abuser, wondering if her illness frightens him, if the hatred is merely a result of discomfort, of fear. A genocide, too, is an act of annihalation, of murder, yet who should really be terrified? It is an act of intense hatred. That said, Plath considers herself already dead. You can see this well, though it’s validity can be argued- can her intense emotion be seen as a final attempt to feel? Or is it a final white flag?  Either way, her voice is loud and manic, yet filled with desperation and mourning, giving the impression of a final, bursting flame before complete and utter darkness. The poem itself is so fierce, so tragic, yet so unflinching with its emotion that it could very well be considered her last words on this earth: a deathbed confession, if you may, mournful not about her death, but for a life she never lived.

A discussion of Lady Lazurus is impossible without a discussion of death, it’s implications, and it’s place in our morality and ethics. Could death be an extension of life? An alternative of life, even? A separate path? Plath doesn’t seem to believe so. She sees herself as nothing more than a corpse already (I may be skin and bone, she states flatly.)  Can one live with the purpose of death?

Given this understanding, Lady Lazurus can be interpreted as a post-mortem cry for justice. Anger burning behind her words, Plath seems to hold some stasis of bitterness and resentment, her words an indictment dry with sarcasm and with a visible hard edge. She is awakened with a freezing-cold touch, again and again, to a life she feels can never live, only pretend to. The true cruelty, she feels, is not her death, but her unwilling resurrection. She sees it as a curse to die again and again and again, a punishment for never being what society wants from her. This could be interpreted either way: referring to her mental illness, or referring to her unwillingness to be a submissive woman, as was expected at the time.

Perhaps it is not fair to describe her as a feminist, purely due to the lack of an agenda behind her nature: rather, she is an example, a martyr of sorts, of the dynamics between love and sex.  The idea of being brought back to life seems twofold, one from a fairytale and one from a nightmare. In this way, comprehending the feminist interpretation of the piece requires context. Plath’s husband, who she loved intensely and without a hint of suspicion, had betrayed her inherent trust in him, through abuse, infidelity, and ultimately desertion. She was trapped in the literal sense, lacking rights as a woman in the 20th century- just as she was trapped in her mind amongst . In this way, you can understand Lady Lazurus as twofold, with an interpretation regarding her situation as a woman in the 1900s, as well as one simply regarding living as a human in an already cruel- heightened so by her ill senses- in this world.

A haunting ode to her darkness, Sylvia proudly boasts, dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. 

Despite this methodological, almost mechanical feel, her cruel dissection of humanity, there is something inherently lyrical and melancholic about Plath’s words. There is perhaps a tenderness is the way she confesses, “there is nothing there,” a betrayal of emotion and grief behind her voice as she compares her mental world to that of mankind’s. If nothing else, Lady Lazarus is a vivid look into the world of mental illness, the fierce terror, and above all, the lack of belief and security- the living without any promises that everything will be okay.

* Hyperbole- there were survivors of the Holocaust.