In Sylvia Plath’s free verse tercets poem “Lady Lazarus," Plath explores her suicide attempts and impulses. Plath expresses her troubled times through allusions to the Bible. Also by using imagery to relate the Holocaust. In her poem, she is the speaker, in which there is no direct audience. As the poet presents the poem, she describes her suicides without ever telling you. The poem has several comparisons to art, “Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well.” To give the poem a deeper meaning, Plath uses symbolic statements. She beats around the bush, therefore gets the reader hooked. Overall the poem is dark and brutal.
The imagery the poet uses in the first 3 stanzas, such as, “my skin bright as a Nazi lampshade, my right foot a paperweight, My face a featureless, fine jew linen.” In WW2 often times prisoners were murdered and their body parts were turned into different objects such as lampshades and paperweights.(1125) Not only did Plath use imagery but also a simile, “my skin bright as a Nazi lampshade.” At the time of this poem being composed, people could see in their head and could relate to the “Nazi lampshade."
Such symbolic statements as, “I have done it again”, and “This is number three” gives the reader a dark and serious feeling. Plath explains how she “[is] like a cat I have nine times to die” And “This is number three." She explains the first time was an accident, but she follows with “The second time I meant it”. Changing the reader's mood like a roller coaster. Plath tells us how old she is without ever verbally addressing it, therefore symbolically telling us she is 30.
Plath addresses herself as performing an act. Therefore she needs an audience. She addresses them as “The peanut-crunching crowd” but to watch there is a “large charge” She destroys her body, but still remains a performer, there giving the audience what they want. This supports the ove...