Sylvia Plath-

(1932-1963)

 Sylvia Plath Typing 

  Sylvia in Yorksire, England (1956)              

Sylvia Plath had found a love for poetry at a very young age. She first starting writing poetry at age five and had one of her works published, right after her father died, at the age of eight. The death of her father lead to the poem “Daddy” in which she expressed rather intense emotions about him. Critic Roger Platizky believes Slyiva was at that time of her life in which, “a child, anxiously separated from a parent, compulsively pushes and pulls a spool forward and backward in an unconscious, ritualized attempt to master the anxiety that is produced by the parent's unreliable presence”. She was a very intelligent individual graduating second in her high school class and first in Boston University class. Throughout those years her poetry continuously progressed as she received much recognition and more publications in newspapers and magazines. She was popular and dated plenty of boys, but her insomnia, depression, and thoughts of suicide eventually caught up with her. Sylvia seemed to be never satisfied with herself, despite successes of her poems, as she would be extremely stressed out and atmptempted multiple times. After Plath’s first attempt at suicide, she wrote her poem “Lady Lazarus” because she felt as if she "had been on the other side of life like Lazarus" (critical article). In a critical article Laura Dahlke explains Plath wrote the poem to help deal with her crises and through it “reveals a struggle for power with a cruel deity that ends in annihilation”. Her depression subsided as she hit another breakthrough and ended up meeting her future husband Ted Huges, at a party

celebrating her success. The relationship was abusive and unfaithful, which later ended up in a divorce with Huges leaving her for Assia Wevill. Her depression returnd when she was thirty,and committed suicide by sitting in front of an open oven, breathing in its gases.

Daddy

You do not do, you do not do

Any more, black shoe

In which I have lived like a foot

For thirty years, poor and white,

Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.



Daddy, I have had to kill you.

You died before I had time--

Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,

Ghastly statue with one gray toe

Big as a Frisco seal



And a head in the freakish Atlantic

Where it pours bean green over blue

In the waters off beautiful Nauset.

I used to pray to recover you.

Ach, du.



In the German tongue, in the Polish town

Scraped flat by the roller

Of wars, wars, wars.

But the name of the town is common.

My Polack friend



Says there are a dozen or two.

So I never could tell where you

Put your foot, your root,

I never could talk to you.

The tongue stuck in my jaw.



It stuck in a barb wire snare.

Ich, ich, ich, ich,

I could hardly speak.

I thought every German was you.

And the language obscene



An engine, an engine

Chuffing me off like a Jew.

A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.

I began to talk like a Jew.

I think I may well be a Jew.



The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna

Are not very pure or true.

With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck

And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack

I may be a bit of a Jew.



I have always been scared of you,

With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.

And your neat mustache

And your Aryan eye, bright blue.

Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You-- 



Not God but a swastika

So black no sky could squeak through.

Every woman adores a Fascist,

The boot in the face, the brute

Brute heart of a brute like you.



You stand at the blackboard, daddy,

In the picture I have of you,

A cleft in your chin instead of your foot

But no less a devil for that, no not 

Any less the black man who



Bit my pretty red heart in two.

I was ten when they buried you.

At twenty I tried to die

And get back, back, back to you.

I thought even the bones would do.



But they pulled me out of the sack,

And they stuck me together with glue.

And then I knew what to do.

I made a model of you,

A man in black with a Meinkampf look



And a love of the rack and the screw.

And I said I do, I do.

So daddy, I'm finally through.

The black telephone's off at the root,

The voices just can't worm through.



If I've killed one man, I've killed two--

The vampire who said he was you

And drank my blood for a year,

Seven years, if you want to know.

Daddy, you can lie back now.



There's a stake in your fat black heart

And the villagers never liked you.

They are dancing and stamping on you.

They always knew it was you.

Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.

(Poets.org) 

In the first part of the poem Sylvia is speaking of how her Father is no longer there
keeping her in darkness where she is unable to do much of anything. She begins to
describe him as a ghastly figure giving the poem a dark tone in the way she views
her Father bitterly. In the lines:
“I never could tell where you 
Put your foot, your root”
I believe that she is saying that her father was unreadable and she was unable to tell what was on his mind.
Expressing how she really never knew him or his background. When she says how she thought every German
was him and how she began to claim she was Jewish it could be in comparison to the Nazi’s and the Jews
with her father’s parenting to his daughter.
“I have always been scared of you, 
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo. 
And your neat mustache 
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.”
In these lines it gives us not only a physical description but shows once again
how she had seen her father as a neat man not regarding him highly calling him a fascist
and a brute and implying he’s has Nazi characteristics.
Then the poem shifts gears in the line:
“At twenty I tried to die 
And get back, back, back to you.” 
It seems that perhaps Sylvia’s depression and darker parts of her mind are sparked up by memories of her father
when she encounters a vampire I believe to be her husband who is just like her father. So when she says she kills
two men instead of just the one in her poem it is husband and father she is killing in her mind and putting
to rest those relationships.

Lady Lazarus
Click to hear Sylvia Plath reading the poem

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 ate will be

At home on me



And I a smiling woman.

I am only thirty.

And like the cat I have nine times to die.



This is Number Three.

What a trash

To annihilate each 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.

(Poets.org)

In Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus” she expresses feelings of hardship and 
personal suffering. This poem was written shortly following a suicide 
attempt, therefore she was obviously going through a great deal of pain while 
constructing this poem. The first lines of the poem explain her struggles of 
growing up as a Jew, 

“A sort of walking miracle, my skin 
Bright as a Nazi lampshade, 
My right foot 

A paperweight, 
My face a featureless, fine 
Jew linen.” 

Her thoughts of suicide begin at this point in her life as she 
realizes the experience and torture a Jew must go through. 
Sylvia compares herself to a cat, “And like the cat I have nine times to 
die.”, meaning she has proceeded surviving after the several times she has 
almost killed herself. The whole poem itself has a lot to do with dying and 
her attempts to commit suicide. She explains her views on dying and how she 
believes it feels in the lines:

 
“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.”

The poem really lays out the way a 
suicidal person thinks for its audience. 

Sources:

http://56218.ihclibproxy.pals.msus.edu/ehost/detail?vid=4&hid=8&sid=5a4a091e-96f 
7-491d-a913-80ccfc45c3f4%40sessionmgr107 
(from EBSCOhost for Daddy)
http://56218.ihclibproxy.pals.msus.edu/ehost/detail?vid=4&hid=112&sid=5a4a091e-9 
6f7-491d-a913-80ccfc45c3f4%40sessionmgr107 
(EBSCOhost for Lady) 

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/plath/lazarus.htm

For more information about Sylvia Plath's life: http://www.neuroticpoets.com/plath/