Lady Lazarus
I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it—
A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot
A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine
Jew linen.
Peel off the napkin
O my enemy.
Do I terrify?—
The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.
Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave at will be
At home on me
And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like a cat I have nine times to die.
This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate every decade.
What a million filaments.
The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see
Them unwrap me hand and foot—
The big strip tease.
Gentlemen, ladies,
These are my hands,
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,
Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.
The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut
As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.
Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I’ve a call.
It’s easy enough to do it in a cell.
It’s easy enough to do it and stay put.
It’s the theatrical
Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:
“A miracle!”
That knocks me out.
There is a charge
For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart—
It really goes.
And there is a charge, a very large charge,
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood
Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.
I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby
That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.
Ash, ash—
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there—
A cake of soap.
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.
Herr God, Herr Lucifer,
Beware
Beware.
Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.
—Sylvia Plath
I want to talk about this poem because it’s the anniversary of Sylvia Plath’s death in 1963. But I also want to talk about this poem because nearly 50 years after her death, Plath’s still the best at describing what it feels like to be watched oppressively. It’s all over the place, this imagery of being on display. There’s the circus: “The peanut-crunching crowd/Shoves in to see/Them unwrap me hand and foot—/The big strip tease./Gentlemen, ladies,/These are my hands,/My knees.” Even the Nazi imagery implies the idea of being watched. Have you ever seen footage or photos of concentration camps? The people contained in those camps were banded up and stripped of everything they owned. Including clothes. They had nowhere to hide, nothing to keep for themselves—including their own bodies. And they were watched. The speaker feels the same way, so she says she “rocked shut/As a seashell.” She says, “They had to call and call/And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.” What a terrible thing to endure.
And yet in the end, this is a confessional poem and the speaker is looking for a resurrection, a rebirth like Lady Lazarus. I sometimes wonder why the speaker (or why I) share so much if it always feels like we’re on display. “Gentlemen, ladies,/These are my hands,/My knees.” I think it’s because while yes, it feels awful to have someone see your failures (or your family’s failures), it’s even more awful to have nothing to share with anyone. Our lives don’t seem to have meaning if we don’t have someone to share the good with, too. My good news means nothing if I can’t tell my best friends, and my mother. So I take that good knowing that my loved ones and everyone else will also see my failures. I take that chance.
I’m sorry Sylvia Plath ran out of lives—because, let’s face it, it’s too hard to separate the poet from the speaker here. But I’m equally thankful for the brief burst of productivity that created Ariel (which this poem is from) right before her death. I’m glad not to be alone in this feeling.
-R
