![]() After this she hypothetically imagines the crowd watching her “number three” suicide attempt. ![]() Tells us that she views suicide as nothing but a mechanism to completely erase whatever progress life had made. “what a trash to annihilate each decade” suggest that Plath’s once a decade suicide attempts are actually a waste. It is only when we come to the line “and like the cat I have nine times to die” we understand that the IT in the poem is a reference to death. (once accidently when she was 10, and another when she was 20-pill overdose) and this line might foreshadow her final suicide attempt. ![]() ![]() “I am only thirty” tells us that she had already attempted suicide twice. But the whole idea of associating comfort with it, tells us that she is used to the odds, probably of death. “Soon, soon the flesh the grave cave ate will be at home on me” The internal rhyme of grave cave is personified as a flesh eater. She thinks of herself as a Jew, a victim. She then uses Holocaust allusions, and describes her skin as a Nazi’s lampshade, and her foot as their paper weight. Plath seems to be doing “IT” every ten years. “I have done IT again”, “once in every 10 years”. The first seven stanza’s from ” I have done it again” to “and like cat I have nine times to die” introduces us to the poem. Plath feels as if she is also some sort of freak for the public. Lepers were often treated like outcasts biblically. Plath describes herself as having some sort defect that causes the “peanut crunching crowd in to see”. Lazarus in the bible was a servant man covered in sores, like leprosy. From the title alone it becomes safe to assume that this poem involves about death and resurrection. Because she calls herself “a sort of walking miracle”, the title seems apt. So when we first see the title Lady Lazarus, what comes to my mind is that, this poem is a feminist approach to resurrection and it is a biblical allusion. Lazarus was a man who was resurrected by Jesus. It does rhyme at various locations but with no set pattern. The loose rhyming scheme suggest the uncertainty and fear. The iambic structure of the poem provides a more masculine tone to the speaker. The structure, the lyrical quality and relatively simple diction could be suitable for a light hearted poem. Lady Lazarus consists of twenty-eight stanza or tercets, of three line each. This assumption is right, when we look into Plath’s life, and are able to relate to the events and situation referred to in the poem. Hence the speaker of the poem was assumed to be her in the beginning. He is the author of, among others, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem.Plath’s poems are usually written on a confessional note. The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. and Mina Loy, who often used mythical personae to write about their own lives. But it’s important not to overlook Plath’s affinities with earlier female poets, especially modernists like H. Plath attended a creative writing class led by the poet who helped to initiate the Confessional movement, Robert Lowell, in the late 1950s. Plath is often grouped with the ‘Confessional poets’ – a group of (mostly American) mid-twentieth-century poets whose work engages with the darker aspects of their own lives, with the focus frequently on the poet’s own struggles with mental health issues. But this is partly because so much of her work drew on her life for its subject-matter, especially her unflinching analysis of her own struggles with her mental health. The life – and death – of Sylvia Plath (1932-63) can sometimes appear to eclipse her poetic achievement, as well as her achievement in fiction (she wrote one novel, The Bell Jar, as well as a collection of short stories).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |