The poem is one of 28 stanzas of 3 lines each. Its opening is done in a casual tone and gives off an ironic sense of achievement as the poet comes back triumphant over her ability to survive death. Plath sees herself as ‘a sort of walking miracle’, drawing parallel with Lazarus, whom Jesus raised from the dead in the Bible, John 11. Plath sees herself as the female Lazarus, who has been raised from the dead 3 times and hence the miracle. Like the sense of miracle, Plath sees her deaths like Lazarus’s for they are not normal sort of deaths.

Plath then draws in the atrocities of the Holocaust by referring to an appalling fact that had emerged from the trials of the Nazi war criminals, was that a concentration camp commandant had lampshades made of human skin. This brings about the deep sense of suffering that the Jews had gone through, probably alluding to her own sense of suffering within. Her ‘right foot a paperweight’, signifying inertia and the inability to move. ‘My face a featureless, fin

The poem ends on a note of glory and terror as we can imagine the grandeur of her rising with her fiery red hair, like the rising of the mythical creature, the Phoenix. Terror is evident in the sentence ‘And I eat men like air’, but due to the ambiguity of the word ‘man’ in the English language, this line can be interpreted as either a feminist declaration or a hostile threat to all mankind. So therefore, as she had warned earlier, for everyone to beware.

With the use of such cold and harsh imageries, Plath’s comment that she is ‘like a cat’ and has ‘nine times to die’ comes across as humourous and almost childlike. Yet it is one filled with great irony, for if her deaths were ones that came every decade as she said, she ought to have lived till ninety, which she did not. We are informed of the total number of times that death has befallen her, although it is unclear what Number One had been, Number Two was obviously the suicide attempt in 1953 and ‘Number Three’ was the car accident in which Plath was involved in summer 1962. The most we can gather on her first account of near-death would be one that happened when she ‘was ten and it was an accident’. Her second time she had meant it and she had ‘rocked shut as a seashell’, showing a clear attempt to shut herself off from this world, as the image of a seashell under the water gives off the impression of isolation, surrounded by nothing but water.

Plath perceives her grand display of her rebirth processes as a performance and like every performance, ‘there is a charge’, there is a fee to pay. This Lady Lazarus plays for the financial exploitation of the audience. The more the audience wishes to see of the performance or the closer they wish to get to the performer, the hi

Some topics in this essay:
Bible John, Doktor’ German, Herr Doktor’s, , Phoenix Terror, Lucifer’ Plath, Lady Lazarus, Lazarus Jesus, Phoenix Plath, process rebirth, feel real, raised dead, holocaust imagery, sense suffering, suffering jews, death plath, ability survive, pure gold, makes feel,