Lady Lazarus rises again with the same resoluteness and determination. If the entire poem had to be summed up in a few lines, this would be it. “Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / and I eat men like air” (l. She makes it feel so purposeful that no one could deny that she is the deciding factor in her life despite the fact that she is not.Īrguably the most poignant lines in the poem are the last three. To feel control, to feel a sense of authority in her own life, she makes her dying feel real. She escapes death, is saved from it, only to yearn to be close to it again. As she says, she thinks of it as her calling. In her mind, Lady Lazarus is connoisseur of death. She says, “dying is an art, / like everything else. Alluding back to the circus image, the speaker talks about dying as a talent or an art. Midway through the poem, the speaker starts telling less about stories and more about how they make her feel. As a bystander of her own life, she is powerless in her own body. She may think she can control at least the most primitive parts of her life, like living or dying, but in reality she is helpless. However, this is not all positive for Lady Lazarus. Brought back to life by others, it is here again that she feels resurrected. “The second time” is when she attempted to commit suicide and was saved. They had to call and call / And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls” (l. The second time I meant / To last it out and not come back at all. She writes, “the first time it happened I was ten. A few stanzas after this, she recalls the times when death was at her doorstep. Because of this, the speaker feels resurrected much similar to Lazarus who was brought back to life by Jesus in the book of John. She has looked in the eyes of death and come back again. Even still, she is here to tell the story. She has come to the brink of death and faced it more than once. With that knowledge, the reader can come to understand that the speaker has encountered death a lot in her life. The mysterious “it” she is referring to is not truly uncovered to the reader until later in the poem but as it continues it becomes obvious that the speaker is discussing her attempted suicide. One year in every ten / I manage it - ” (l. The poem begins on an obscure note reading, as the first stanza, “I have done it again. In Lady Lazarus, Sylvia Plath explores the resurrection of living through a suicide attempt through the tale of Lazarus, which reveals that no one can control anything in their life - not even death. All of these experiences palpably influenced Plath’s poetry. Soon after, Plath married English poet Ted Hughes whose later infidelity and ensuing divorce sent Plath into a crippling depression. Despite deep depression and a consequential suicide attempt in 1953, Plath managed to graduate summa cum laude from Smith College in 1955. Sylvia Plath was born in 1932 in Boston, Massachusetts to Aurelia Schober and Otto Plath, the latter of whom died when Sylvia was eight. It is written to an unnamed “you” from the perspective of a suicidal woman who shares a significant amount of similarities with the poet. The poem is about death or, more specifically, suicide. “Lady Lazarus”, written by Sylvia Plath in 1962, was a poem gathered posthumously through her collection Ariel published in 1965.