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Plath, Sylvia

193263, American poet, b. Boston. Educated at Smith College and Cambridge, Plath
published poems even as a child and won many academic and literary awards. Her first
volume of poetry, The Colossus (1960), is at once highly disciplined, well crafted, and
intensely personal; these qualities are present in all her work. Ariel (1968), considered her
finest book of poetry, was written in the last months of her life and published posthumously, as
were Crossing the Water (1971) and Winter Trees (1972). These late poems reveal an
objective detachment from life and a growing fascination with death. They are rendered with
impeccable and ruthless art, describing the most extreme reaches of Plath's consciousness
and passions. Her one novel, The Bell Jar (1971), originally published in England under the
pseudonym Victoria Lucas in 1962, is autobiographical, a fictionalized account of a nervous
breakdown Plath had suffered when in college. Plath was married to the poet Ted Hughes and
was the mother of two children. She committed suicide in London in Feb., 1963.

Bibliography
See her collected poems (1981); occasional prose, Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams
(1979); journals, ed. by T. Hughes and F. McCullough (1983); The Unabridged Journals of
Sylvia Plath, 19501962 (2000), ed. by K. V. Kulil; biographies by E. Butscher (1979), L.
Wagner-Martin (1987), A. Stevenson (1989), P. Alexander (1991), and J. Rose (1991); The
Silent Woman (1994) by J. Malcolm; studies by M. Broe (1980), J. Rosenblatt (1982), and L.
Wagner-Martin, ed. (1988, repr. 1997).

Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath was born in Boston in 1932. She grew up in a comfortably

middle-class style and attended Smith College. She suffered a
breakdown at the end of her junior year of college, but recovered well
enough to return and excel during her senior year, receiving various
prizes and graduating summa cum laude. In 1955, having been awarded a
Fulbright scholarship, she began two years at Cambridge University.
There she met and married the British poet Ted Hughes and settled in
England, bearing two children. Her first book of poems, The Colossus
(1960), demonstrated her precocious talent, but was far more
conventional than the work that followed. Having studied with Robert Lowell in 1959 and been
influenced by the "confessional" style of his collection Life Studies, she embarked on the new
work that made her posthumous reputation as a major poet. A terrifying record of her
encroaching mental illness, the poems that were collected after her suicide (at age 30) in 1963 in
the volumes Ariel, Crossing the Water, and Winter Trees are graphically macabre, hallucinatory in
their imagery, but full of ironic wit, technical brilliance, and tremendous emotional power. Her
Selected Poems were published by Ted Hughes in 1985.

Two Views of Plath's Life and Career--by Linda Wagner-Martin and Anne Stevenson

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 Linda Wagner-Martin
Sylvia Plath was born in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, the older child of Otto and Aurelia
Schoeber Plath. Her father was professor of German and entomology (a specialist on bees) at
Boston University; her mother, a high school teacher, was his student. Both parents valued
learning. In 1940 Otto died of complications from surgery after a leg amputation, and Aurelia's
parents became part of the household to care for the children when she returned to teaching.
Sylvia's interests in writing and art continued through her public school years in Wellesley,
Massachusetts, and at Smith College, where she attended on scholarships. Her extensive
publications of poems and fiction led to her selection for the College Board of Mademoiselle
magazine in 1953. The depression that was endemic in her father's family troubled her during her
junior year; when her mother sought treatment for her, she was given bi-polar electroconvulsive
shock treatments as an out-patient. In August 1953, she attempted suicide by overdosing on
sleeping pills.
Recovered after six months of intensive therapy, Sylvia returned to Smith and her usual academic
success. A senior, she wrote an honors thesis on Dostoyevski's use of the double and graduated
summa cum laude in English; she also won a Fulbright fellowship to study at Newnham College,
Cambridge. In the fall of 1955, she sailed for England.
Plath studied hard but her life in England was also sexual. As her writing showed, she was angry
about double-standard behavior, and claimed for herself the right to as much sexual experience as
men had. She believed combining the erotic and the intellectual possible, and when she met Ted
Hughes, a Cambridge poet, she felt that life with him would be ideal. The two were married in
London on 16 June 1956, accompanied by Sylvia's mother.
After a honeymoon in Spain, the Hugheses set up housekeeping. Sylvia passed her examinations
while Ted taught in a boys' school; in June they sailed for America. The next year Sylvia taught
freshman English at Smith; in 1958 and 1959 they lived in Boston and wrote professionally. Ted's
first poem collection, The Hawk in the Rain, won a major poetry prize; Sylvia's promise that she
would make him a success seemed fulfilled. Unfortunately, giving such single-minded attention to
Ted's work meant that developing her own voice as a writer was difficult. She visited Robert
Lowell's class in poetry writing, where she met George Starbuck and Anne Sexton; Sexton's work
became an inspiration to her. Plath worked part-time as a secretary in the psychiatric division of
Massachusetts General Hospital, transcribing patients' histories, which often included dreams.
She also resumed therapy with the woman psychiatrist who had helped her after her breakdown.
The years in the States convinced Ted that he needed to live in England. After an autumn at
Yaddo, the writers' colony, Ted and Sylvia sailed for London in December 1959. Sylvia was happy:
she was writing good poems (she had written 'The Colossus' at Yaddo, where she had discovered
Theodore Roethke's poetry), and she was five months pregnant. Soon after Frieda's birth on 1
April 1960, they began looking for a country house to escape cramped, expensive London. In late
summer of 1961, they moved to Devon, where Sylvia was ecstatic about their centuries-old manor
house. Before that time, however, they wrote efficiently (sometimes in the borrowed study of
poet W. S. Merwin), and Plath was able to finish most of The Bell Jar. Influenced by J. D.
Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, Sylvia's novel narrated a woman's life from adolescence, ending
with a positive resolution of rebirth.
Ted wrote programs for the BBC and became a Faber author, in contact with T. S. Eliot and other
important British poets; Sylvia was publishing new kinds of poems, content that William Heinemann
had contracted to publish her book, The Colossus and Other Poems. Its publication in October
1960 was well received, and Alfred Knopf published the collection in the States.
Personal jealousies, differences in American and British views of gender roles, and a return of
Sylvia's depression complicated the Plath-Hughes marriage. Despite their happiness when Sylvia
became pregnant once more, after an earlier miscarriage, the marriage of two aspiring writers
living in an isolated village with an infant and little money was difficult. After Nicholas's birth in
January 1962, Sylvia faced the fact of Hughes's infidelity, expressing herself through
increasingly angry--and powerful--poems. In contrast to such work as "The Rabbit Catcher" and
"The Detective," her radio play for the BBC, 'Three Women," is a beautifully wrought, somber
poem about maternal choice. Plath had learned to find joy in her women-centered world, and the
care of her children and friendships with other women were increasingly important. But she could

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not tolerate male irresponsibility. Living with the children in lonely Devon, Plath wrote many of the
poems that later appeared in Ariel. Her so-called October poems, written during the month after
Hughes had left her, are among her most famous: "Lady Lazarus," "Daddy," "Fever 103," "Purdah,"
"Poppies in July," "Ariel," and others. The magazines to which she sent these poems did not accept
them; although the New Yorker magazine had a First Reading contract, its poetry editor refused
all her late work except for a few lines.
Moving with the children to a London flat in December 1962, Plath tried to make a new life for
herself, but the worst winter in a century added to her depression. Without a telephone, ill, and
troubled with the care of the two infants, she committed suicide by sleeping pills and gas
inhalation on 11 February 1963, just two weeks after the publication of The Bell Jar (written by
"Victoria Lucas").
That novel, and the various collections of her poems that appeared during the next twenty years,
secured for Plath the position of one of the most important women writers in the States. The
mixture of comedic self-deprecation and forceful anger made her work a foreshadowing of the
feminist writing that appeared in the later 1960s and the 1970s. Like Friedan's 1963 The
Feminine Mystique, Plath's Bell Jar followed in 1965 with the posthumously published collection
Ariel, was both a harbinger and an early voice of the women's movement. As the posthumous
awarding of the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry to Plath's Collected Poems showed, her audience
was not limited to women readers, nor did her writing express only feminist sentiments.
Plath's work is valuable for its stylistic accomplishments--its melding of comic and serious
elements, its ribald fashioning of near and slant rhymes in a free-form structure, its terse voicing
of themes that have too often been treated only with piety. It is also valuable for its ability to
reach today's reader, because of its concern with the real problems of our culture. In this age of
gender conflicts, broken families, and economic inequities, Plath's forthright language speaks
loudly about the anger of being both betrayed and powerless.
The Sylvia Plath papers are housed at the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, and at
Smith College, Northampton, Mass. Ted Hughes published selections from her journals (The
Journals of Sylvia Plath, ed. Frances McCullough, 1982) and some of the short fiction (Johnny
Panic and the Bible of Dreams, Short Stories, Prose and Diary Excerpts, 1980); Aurelia Plath
published Letters Home by Sylvia Plath, Correspondence 1950-1963 (1975). Lynda K. Bundtzen,
Plath's Incarnations: Woman and the Creative Process, (1983). Steven Tabor, Sylvia Plath: An
Analytical Bibliography (1987). Linda Wagner-Martin, Sylvia Plath, A Biography (1987). Linda
Wagner-Martin, ed., Sylvia Plath: The Critical Heritage (1988). Anne Stevenson, Bitter Fame: A
Life of Sylvia Plath, (1989). Steven Axelrod, Sylvia Plath, The Wound and the Cure of Words,
(1990).

From The Oxford Companion to Womens Writing in the United States . Copyright
1995 by Oxford University Press.

Anne Stevenson
Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on 27 October (she shared a birthday with Dylan
Thomas), and spent her childhood in Winthrop. When she was 8 her German father, a professor at
Boston University, died of diabetes. Two years later her mother moved the family inland to
Wellesley, where she struggled to give Sylvia and her younger brother every advantage of a
superior education. Self-consciousness and anxiety about status and money during adolescence
contributed to the profound insecurity Plath concealed all her life beneath a faade of brassy
energy and brilliant achievement.
Plath discovered that writing was her vocation very early. By the time she was at Smith College in
the early 1950s she had published precocious poems in newspapers and written over fifty short
stories, some of which won prizes from ladies' magazines. At Smith she went on winning prizes,
but after a third year of feverish overwork, she broke down and attempted suicide. Six months in
a private hospital set her on her feet again, but in reality she never recovered.

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After she had graduated, summa cum laede, from Smith in 1955, she went to Cambridge
University on a Fulbright scholarship, and there she met the poet Ted Hughes. They were married
in London in June 1956. The marriage was for six years a strong union of supremely dedicated
writers. Sylvia's wholehearted enthusiasm for Hughes's work, which she sent off to the
competition that won him fame, was balanced by his steadfast belief in her exceptional gift. They
lived in Massachusetts (Cambridge, Northampton--where Sylvia taught for a year at Smith--and
Boston), then in London and Devon. A daughter, Frieda, was born in April 1960, and a son, Nicholas,
in January 1962.
Sylvia Plath's early poems--already drenched in typical imagery of glass, moon, blood, hospitals,
foetuses, and skulls--were mainly 'exercises' or pastiches of work by poets she admired: Dylan
Thomas, W. B. Yeats, Marianne Moore. Late in 1959, when she and her husband were at Yaddo, the
writers' colony in New York State, she produced the seven-part 'Poem for a Birthday', which owes
its form to Theodore Roethke's 'Lost Son' sequence, though its theme is her own traumatic
breakdown and suicide attempt at 21. After 1960 her poems increasingly explored the surreal
landscape of her imprisoned psyche under the looming shadow of a dead father and a mother on
whom she was resentfully dependent.
A fanatical preoccupation with death and rebirth informs her sad, cynical novel, The Bell Jar, as it
does her first book of poems, The Colossus, published in London by Heinemann in October 1960,
and by Knopf in New York, in 1962. Plath's mature poetry, too exalted to be merely 'confessional',
frequently treats of this resurrection theme, together with a related one which attempts to
redeem meaningless life through art. Lines like I am lost, I am lost, in the robes of all this light
('Witch Burning), and 'On Fridays the little children come / To trade their hooks for hands' ('The
Stones') foreshadow the powerful, wholly convincing voice of poems like 'The Hanging Man',
published posthumously in Ariel: 'By the roots of my hair some god got hold of me. / I sizzled in
his blue volts like a desert prophet.'
Ted Hughes has described how Sylvia Plath underwent a searing, 'curiously independent process of
gestation' during the spring of 1962, when, two months after giving birth to a son, she produced a
powerful radio drama, 'Three Women'. The first deathly Ariel Poems appeared soon afterwards
with 'The Moon and Yew Tree', 'Little Fugue', 'Elm', 'Event', 'Berck-Plage', and others. During
the summer of 1962 her marriage to Hughes began to buckle; she was devastated when she
learned that he had been unfainthful to her. Although she, and Hughes travelled to Ireland
together in September, the marriage was by then in ruins, and in October she asked her husband
to leave for good.
It was after Hughes's departure that Plath produced, in less than two months, the forty poems of
rage, despair, love, and vengeance that have chiefly been responsible for her immense posthumous
fame. Throughout October and November of 1962 she rose every day at dawn to take down, as
from dictation, line after miraculous line of poems like 'The Bee Meeting', 'Stings', 'Daddy', 'Lady
Lazarus', 'Ariel', and 'Death & Company', as well as those heartbreaking poems to her baby son:
'Nick and the Candlestick' and 'The Night Dances'.
In December 1962 she moved with her children from Devon to London. What she recognized as
the 'genius' of her poetry temporarily restored her self-confidence, but in January 1963, after
the publication of The Bell Jar, and during the coldest winter of the century, she descended into a
deep, clinical depression, and in the early morning of 11 February, she gassed herself.
In the quarter-century following her suicide Sylvia Plath has become a heroine and martyr of the
feminist movement. In fact, she was a martyr mainly to the recurrent psychodrama that staged
itself within the bell jar of her tragically wounded personality. Twelve final poems, written shortly
before her death, define a nihilistic metaphysic from which death provided the only dignified
escape.

From The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English. Copyright

1994 by Oxford University Press.

On "The Colossus"

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 Robert Phillips
This hatred of men and the unhealthiness of her mental condition continue to ground the figures
of "The Colossus." The speakers identity here hinges on a broken idol out of the stream of
civilization, one whose "hours are married to shadow." No longer does she "listen for the scrape of
a keel / on the blank stones of the landing." Man, personified by a ship, has no place in her scheme.
The marriage to shadow is a marriage to the memory of the poets father, and therefore to death
itself. The pull toward that condition is the subject of "Lorelei" as well as the central symbol of
"A Winter Ship." That she perceived the nature of her own psychic condition is clear not only in
the identification with the broken idol of "The Colossus," but also with the broken vase of "The
Stones." Plath makes a metaphor for her reverse misogyny in "The Bull of Bendylaw," where she
transmogrifies that traditionally feminine body, the sea (note the article, la mere), into a brute
bull, a potent symbol for the active masculine principle. The bull, as in all Palaeo-oriental cultures,
is a symbol of both destruction and power. Yet, as with many of Plaths symbols, there is a
complexity beyond this.

From "The Dark Tunnel: A Reading of Sylvia Plath." Modern Poetry Studies 3.2
(1972).

Margaret Dickie
"The Colossus" is Plath's admission of defeat and analysis of her own impotence. . . . Plath
transfers elements from the myths and rituals of the dying god to the colossus figure and
elaborates them with references to Greek tragedy to make her poem a complicated, often
enigmatic, study of her own failure. . . .
Plath selects the ancient role of the female who mourns the dying god, or the heroine who tends
the idol, and brings it into her poem as felt experience. In fact, it is so fully felt that its classical
and mythical references become entangled in a confusion of meaning. The colossus is a statue, a
father, a mythical being; he is a ruined idol, "pithy and historical as the Roman Forum," and at the
same time a figure whose great lips utter "Mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles," an echo of
Hughes's language. The persona in the poem crawls over him, squats in his ear, eats her lunch
there - intimate activities that hardly seem the rites of a priestess. The colossus himself is both
a stone idol with "immense skull-plates" and "fluted bones and acanthine hair," and at the same
time a natural wilderness covered with "weedy acres" and "A hill of black cypress." Much remains
beneath the surface in this poem, and much on the surface appears confusing.
The fact that the statue is addressed at one point as "father" has caused most critics to link this
poem with Plath's own father and her poetic treatment of him; but nothing in this poem demands
that single interpretation. Perhaps the colossus is not the actual father but the creative father, a
suggestion reinforced by the fact that the spirit of the Ouija board from which Plath and Hughes
received hints of subjects for poems claimed that his family god, Kolossus, gave him most of his
information. The colossus, then, may be Plath's private god of poetry, the muse which she would
have to make masculine in order to worship and marry. The concentration of mouth imagery to
describe the colossus also points to his identification as a speaker or poet. The persona has
labored thirty years "To dredge the silt from your throat," although, she admits, "I am none the
wiser." She suggests, "Perhaps you consider yourself an oracle, / Mouthpiece of the dead, or of
some god or other." In the end, she says, "The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue." No
messages came from the throat, the mouthpiece, the tongue of this figure; this god is silent, yet
the speaker feels bound to serve him. The sense of servitude and of the impossible task of such
service reflects the creative exhaustion Plath felt during this period. Her statement at the end
that "My hours are married to shadow" may be an admission that she is married, in fact, to
darkness and creative silence, rather than to the god of poetry who could fertilize her. Her fears
also center on the catastrophe that produced the crumbling of the idol: "It would take more than
a lightning-stroke/ To create such a ruin." This admission, enigmatic if the statue is her father or
a dying god, recalls Plath's early poetic concerns about creative paralysis and the sense of a
collapsing order.

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 from Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Copyright 1979 by the Board of Trustees of
the University of Illinois.

Eileen M. Aird
In 'Daddy' she addresses the dead father in the following way: 'Ghastly statue with one grey
toe / Big as a Frisco seal', and this image recalls the title-poem of the earlier volume in which the
father-daughter relationship is treated through the medium of an archeological metaphor. As in
'The Beekeeper's Daughter' the meaning of the poem lies not on the surface but through the
accumulation of allusions and suggestions. The image of the devotion of great effort to the
cleansing and repairing of a massive statue, a task which has already occupied thirty years yet
seems no nearer completion, and which engrosses and subjugates the persona, whose humorous
derision is underlain by a total commitment to her task, is fascinating and powerful in itself.
However it seems impossible to separate meaning and metaphor without doing the poem a serious
injustice for its menace lies in the skillfully maintained balance between the concrete situation
with its appropriate visual details and the relation of these details to the underlying emotion. The
last three lines of the poem, for instance, contain much more than a particularly striking image:

My hours are married to shadow.

No longer do I listen for the scrape of a keel
On the blank stones of the landing.

This final image has considerable pathos and beauty and is imaginatively in unity with the growing
despair of the earlier verses, but read in conjunction with the line which immediately precedes it,
it is also a statement of the submission of the restorer to the broken statue and her acceptance,
indicated in the word 'married', that there can be no escape from this memory into a more vital
relationship. In such a life everything must be shadowy, blank, lonely, but she accepts her isolation
almost with fervour.
'The Colossus' has the direct, conversational tone of the later poems and it is written in the five-
line verse which Sylvia Plath was to use most consistently in Ariel, in fourteen out of the forty
poems, although in this first volume only six poems have five-lined verses. The earlier tendency to
choose the esoteric or archaic word has now disappeared, although the rather unusual 'skull-
plates' is also used in another poem of this group, 'Two Views of a Cadaver Room'. The verses are
not rhymed and the line lengths follow no regular pattern; the poem is by no means formless but is
much less strictly and rigidly controlled than those poems written two years earlier. In this
greater elasticity can be seen the forerunner of Sylvia Plath's later style which she admitted was
much closer to the rhythms of spoken English than that of her earlier poetry,

from Sylvia Plath: Her Life and Work. Copyright 1973 by Eileen M. Aird

Suzanne Juhasz
Even in a poem like "The Colossus," in which the poet is exploring a very private, very personal
experience, her relationship with her dead father whom she both adores and hates because he
died, because he is dead and still influences her life, she needs at this point in her career to
generalize even mythicize the experience to control it and therefore to write about it. (From later
poems on the theme, such as "Daddy," we get a clearer picture of the devastating strength of, her
emotions. But in this poem they are modulated by their symbolic form.)
The father is seen as a great but broken statue, a ruin from some former time: "O father, all by
yourself / You are pithy and historical as the Roman Forum." The poet is laboring, as she has been
for thirty years, she says, to get him "put together entirely / Pieced, glued, and properly
jointed"to bring him back to life or to put him into perspective, either way means freeing

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herself from his power. Plaths characteristic irony (yet another method of distancing) is here
directed upon herself :

Scaling little ladders with gluepots and pails of lysol

I crawl like an ant in morning
Over the weedy acres of your brow
To mend the immense skull plates and clear
The bald, white tumuli of your eyes.

This strange scene is put into its "proper" context: "A blue sky out of the Oresteia / Arches
above us." There is again the mockery: we are like some characters out of a Greek drama, not real
people at all; but there is also the epic dimension that the vision gives to these actors. The poet is
not only Sylvia Plath, she is a type of Electra, the daughter who avenged the murder of her
father, Agamemnon. They become more than themselves when identified with the devoted
daughter/dead father archetype. Finally, the very setting itself helps to supply the story:

Nights, I squat in the cornucopia

Of your left ear, Out of the wind,

Counting the red stars and those of plum-color.

The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue.
My hours are married to shadow.
No longer do I listen for the scrape of a keel
On the blank stones of the landing.

The scene, being a symbolic construction, is meant to be translated into a psychological and
emotional vocabulary: I am yoked, dedicated to death, observes the protagonist. The giant statue
is mythic and larger than life, but in being so it is also the pastit is irrevocably dead and cannot
be reconstructed. But it has become her only home. She lives in its shadow and views the living
world from its perspective. Her own life, as she sees it, is therefore a living death.

from Naked and Fiery Forms: Modern American Poetry by Women, a New
Tradition. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976. Copyright 1976.

Grace Shulman
"The Colossus" represents a turning point in her poems about the father, about the gods in her
mythology, and about what she spoke of as her "death," the failed suicide attempt of 1953. After
"The Colossus," those themes are objectified, or developed presentatively, with minimal
description. "The Colossus" itself exhibits a rather sassy, defiant attitude toward the stone ruins
addressed as father. Where "Ouija" called forth a god, "The Colossus" portrays another creature
entirely: "Perhaps you consider yourself an oracle, /Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or
other." Most striking are the ironic, mock-heroic effects; antithetical to the damaged stone mass,
the speaker performs small, domestic labors: "Scaling little ladders with gluepots and pails of
Lysol/I crawl like an ant in mourning/Over the weedy acres of your brow . . ."
"The Colossus" is more successful than "Electra on the Azalea Path" because of its frankly
unsentimental view, enforced by withheld emotion and by a preposterous, wildly humorous central
image. If the massive image here is inaccessible, like the earlier figures, the speaker is irreverent,
and is, in fact, weary of trying to mend the immense stone ruins. Plath is still very far from her
outcry of 1962, "Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through." She is, however, at this point, turning
from the stone wreckage of another being to the ruins of her own. The movement is vital, for it
indicates her wish to leave death--her father's actual death and her own dramatized death--for
new life.

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 From "Sylvia Plath and Yaddo" in Ariel Ascending: Writings about Sylvia Plath . Ed.
Paul Alexander. Copyright 1985 by Paul Alexander.

Jon Roseblatt
Plath imagines that the Colossus, which once dominated the harbor at Rhodes, is her fathers dead
body, now lying broken in pieces on a hillside. The father's "ancient" power and size have been
destroyed through time. The Colossus image embodies both the poet's fear of the stonelike,
resistant force of the patriarch and her admiration for the colossal power that her father once
possessed. The broken statue indicates, as "Point Shirley" did, that the dead man cannot be
recovered through piecing him, or the poet's memories of him, together again, although the poet
continues to gaze in fear and love at him.
Plath had used the Colossus image once before, in an apprentice poem called "Letter to a Purist"
(1956), without identifying the statue with her father and without imagining that the statue had
been broken into pieces:

That grandiose colossus who

Stood astride
The envious assaults of the sea
(Essaying, wave by wave,
Tide by tide,
To undo him perpetually),
Has nothing on you,
O my love,

O my great idiot, who

With one foot
Caught (as it were) in the muck-trap
Of skin and bone,
Dithers with the other way out
In preposterous provinces of the mad cap
Cloud-cuckoo,
Agawp at the impeccable moon.

In the much superior poem in The Colossus, Plath successfully uses the statue as a symbol for the
father's vanished power. Instead of the awkward and arch language of the earlier poem
("essaying," "agawp," "as it were"), she finds a more colloquial, though still somewhat stilted,
language with which to address her father:

I shall never get you put together entirely,

Pieced, glued, and properly jointed.
Mule bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles
Proceed from your great lips.
It's worse than a barnyard.

While the first lines still imitate a literary source, Dylan Thomas's elegy for Ann Jones ("After
the funeral, mule praises, brays"), the poem goes on to discover its own language of praise and
contempt for the father. The central metaphor is ingeniously varied, as in the comparison of the
eyes of the statue to "bald white tumuli" or in the conversion of the tongue into a pillar. By
sticking to the fantasized situation--a young daughter's archaeological reconstruction of the
father-statue--Plath gives a surrealistic quality to the metaphor. We seem to be at a halfway
point between the psychic obsessions of an interior drama and the public concerns of the
archaeologist. The poem is still split, though, between two objectives: the expression of a vitriolic

9
contempt for the abandoning father and a rigid pride in his all-powerful, paternal authority. "The
Colossus" is halfway to "Daddy" from the earlier "Letter to a Purist."

From Sylvia Plath: The Poetry of Initiation. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1979. Copyright 1979 by The University of North Carolina
Press.

Steven Gould Axelrod

In much of her later poetry, Sylvia Plath sought to give birth to a creative or "deep" self hidden
within hera Wordsworthian "imaginative power" or Whitmanian "real Me." By unpeeling an outer
self of "dead hands, dead stringencies," she sought to unveil and give voice to an inner "queen" or
"White Godiva," a spirit of rebellious expressiveness. Although she may at least partially have
achieved this goal in such celebrated poems as "Daddy," "Lady Lazarus," and "Ariel," she more
characteristically dwelt on her fears that she would failthat she would be unable to reveal her
"deep self," or that she did not in fact possess such a self at all. Plath's figures for these fears
were the mirror and the shadow. While a number of criticsfor example, Judith Kroll, Jon
Rosenblatt, and Susan Van Dynehave ably analyzed Plath's imagery of rebirth, none has focused
attention on these images of incapacity.
In theory, the mirror should have provided Plath with access to an "abstract Platonic realm" of
pure imagination: "and so to the mirror-twin, Muse" (J, pp. 117,194). But in fact, it functioned
merely as an agent of anxious narcissism. It was an "egoistic mirror" reflecting an ugly outer being
but no inner queena Baudelairean mirror of despair. Similarly, her shadows represented not an
imaginative second world but the insubstantiality of creative nonbeing. At uncreative times, Plath
felt that she was living in the "shadow" of others, usually male ( L, p. 567). If the mirror in her
poetry expressed "the corruption of matter, mere mindless matter," the shadow expressed "the
deadness of a being . . . who no longer creates" (J, pp. 157, 164). Although the former emphasizes
gross corporality and the latter thin evanescence, both are images of Plath's negative vision of
herself and her world. Plath's tropes of mirror and shadow express the imaginative self-doubt
that haunted her poetic career.
Plath's interest in mirrors and shadows probably originated in her work preparing her honor's
thesis during her senior year at Smith College. This thesis, "The Magic Mirror: A Study of the
Double in Two of Dostoevski's Novels," represented the most sustained intellectual inquiry she
ever made. In researching the thesis, she read, among other "psychological and religious studies,"
James Frazer's chapter on "The Perils of the Soul" in The Golden Bough, Otto Rank's chapter on
"The Double as Immortal Self" in Beyond Psychology, and Freud's essay on "The 'Uncanny.'" Each
of these works had a lasting effect on Plath and helped shape her subsequent poetic expression.
All three examined the literary and psychological significance of the "double," with the Frazer and
Rank studies paying special attention to the figure's appearance as reflection or shadow.

[....]

As a writer, Plath liked to repeat old themes and recapture popular traditions, and she turned
instinctively to ancient beliefs in the supernatural as an antidote to an overly socialized,
superrationalized civilization. More to the point, she used these images as an antidote to her
personal oversocialization and superrationalism; she used them as an outlet for her blocked
emotions. But she powerfully revised such images, no matter how venerable and hardy, to fit them
into motifs specifically applicable to herself. She made the shadow evoke what was for her the
equivalent of spiritual essenceimaginative identity.
In Plath's shadow poems, this "most vital part" of the self is prevented from coming into being not
only by the corporeal, factitious mask we see revealed in the mirror poems but also by external
authoritarian figures. If the mirror poems dramatize a struggle that takes place wholly within the
self, the shadow poems usually imply a conflict between the self and others. But again the poems
vibrate with an inner contradiction: they figure the failure of figuration. Plath's "shadow"

10
represents precisely what cannot appear in her mirrorthe ghost of creativity. Shadow betokens
the imaginative self that might have been but was forbidden to be, the defeated "deep" self.
In "The Colossus," the textual "I" states that her "hours are married to shadow"that is, to the
soul of the inanimate and oppressive father-husband who lives only in her remembrance ( CP, pp.
129- 30). As a result, she herself becomes increasingly shadowlike. Indeed, she is the only
shadow-being in the scene, since the "colossus" stands in the sun, making the shade that she lives
in. Plath often equated "sun" with the "saying of poems" ( L, p. 274), and darkness with creative
dearth. She complained of living in the "shadow" of the powerful males she felt both tied to and
intimidated by (e.g., L, p. 567). So often in the journals and letters, as in her poems, the "I" fails
to make a shadow of her own: "apathetic about my workdistant, bemused, feeling, as I said, a
ghost of the world I am working in, casting no shadow" ( J, p. 221). Existence in and as a shadow in
"The Colossus" thus represents the creative half-life that is, rather than the full life that might
have been. The "I" does not possess her own shadow, her Own artistic identity, but is possessed
by that of another. Frazer tells us that "injury done to the shadow is felt by the person or animal
as if it were done to his body," and conversely, "it may under certain circumstances be as
hazardous to be touched" by the shadow of another.

from "The Mirror and the Shadow: Plath's Poetics of Self-Doubt." Contemporary
Literature 26:3. 1985. pp. 286-301.

Robyn Marsack
The significance of the statue is clear enough: an enormous figure, catastrophically removed from
sight and irrecoverable in its original form. It is close to the small child's view of her wondrous
parent -- and yet, the dignity of this colossal presence is severely compromised in the poem's first
stanza: the giant sounds like a barnyard. I think this is the kind of phrase Ostriker had in mind
with regard to 'reducing the verbal glow'.
Furthermore, the tone of the next stanza hovers between the lightly accusing and a wearied
impatience: 'Perhaps you consider yourself an oracle...'. It is he, not she, who has set himself up as
the interpreting voice. But she has colluded, spent all these years clearing his throat. What might
this mean in terms of her own use of language?
You might like to look up her story 'Among the Bumblebees' (in Johnny Panic), which is very plainly
an autobiographical account of the loss of a godlike father; he takes 'Alice' on his back as he
swims, and shows her the secrets of bumblebees. The story opens: 'In the beginning there was
Alice Denway's father. . .; the echo of St John's gospel is deliberate: 'In the beginning was the
Word ... and the Word was God.' The implications for Plath, and for women writers in general, of
this linkage of male authority, godlike power and, as it seems, ownership of the language (although,
of course, Mary bore the son of God, that is, the Word), is something that feminist critics have
illuminatingly explored. Plath tended to link the father-figure with an oracular figure; let me refer
you here to the poem 'On the Decline of Oracles', written in 1958 at the same time as 'The
Disquieting Muses', both on paintings by de Chirico. The titles suggest a relationship between the
disappearance of the male (and his voice) and the ascendancy of the female in her accusing silence.
Something of the sculptural quality of 'The Colossus' may derive from de Chirico's paintings as
much as from the legendary Colossus: his Enigma of the Oracle shows on the right a brilliant white
head above a dark curtain, much taller than the draped figure on the left, which seems to
contemplate a churning sea. Plath wanted to use as epigraph to her earlier poem a quotation from
de Chirico--'Inside a ruined temple the broken statue of a god spoke a mysterious language'
(Journals, p. 211). So we can see her working and reworking the notion that the dead father had
something to say that she cannot grasp, and in both de Chirico's painting and 'On the Decline of
Oracles' the message or expectation is related to the sea.
Let us look briefly at the opening of 'On the Decline of Oracles': can you see how Plath's art has
developed from this, even in so short a time?

11
 My father kept a vaulted conch
By two bronze bookends of ships in sail,
And as I listened its cold teeth seethed
With voices of that ambiguous sea
Old Bcklin missed, who held a shell
To hear the sea he could not hear.
What the seashell spoke to his inner ear
He knew, but no peasants know.

There is no explicit connection, after all, with de Chirico, and the mention of Bcklin seems
entirely arbitrary. The poem seems to have begun with an event and then moved into exercise. In
the end, the images become portentous, and lose any sense of personal association; they become
pieces of a puzzle jammed into place. The first stanzas, however, I suspect arose from
information in James Thrall Soby's study of de Chirico, when he discusses Bcklin's influence. A
shrouded figure in one of Bcklin's paintings is reproduced in The Enigma of the Oracle. The
Tuscan peasants, used to Northern painters who revelled in the Italian landscape, were puzzled by
Bcklin's behaviour, as Soby recounts: Toward the end of his life, for example, Bcklin had sat for
hours in his garden, paralyzed and near death, but holding to his ears great sea shells so as to hear
the roar of an ocean he could no longer visit. The landlocked painter's gesture must have had a
peculiar poignancy for Plath, given her association of the loss of seascape with the loss of her
father, but in this early poem she does not seem to dare to explore its meaning, so that the
second half of the poem is abruptly impersonal. In The Colossus', on the other hand, her
associations float freely, and the structure of the poem is more fluid, less willed.
De Chirico, incidentally, commended Bcklin for exploiting the 'tragic aspects of statuary'--his
own use of statues is more disruptive. The legacy of classical civilization for an early twentieth-
century Italian painter was problematic in the same way as the legacy of Renaissance literature
was for T.S. Eliot. Plath does not have this sense of responsibility to a tradition (it was not until
she went to Cambridge that she felt its potentially inhibiting presence), as distinct from an art,
nor is she bound by the particularly male aspect of creativity that sculpture in the main
represents. In 'The Colossus' it is the particularly female role of housekeeper that she assumes in
relation to this colossal, fallen figure. Even the word 'gluepot' suggests the inadequacy of
resources to the task. Note that word 'tumuli', so typical of the thesaurus-using Plath; here its
precise Latinity seems apt to the classical setting. (It also reminds me of Magritte's surrealist
painting Napoleon's Death Mask, a blank-eyed blue head with clouds floating across it.) Why do
you think she evokes the Oresteia here?

A blue sky out of the Oresteia

Arches above us. O father, all by yourself
You are pithy and historical as the Roman Forum.
I open my lunch on a hill of black cypress.
Your fluted bones and acanthine hair are littered

In their old anarchy to the horizon-line.

It would take more than a lightning-stroke
To create such a ruin.
Nights, I squat in the cornucopia
Of your left ear, out of the wind,

Counting the red stars and those of plum-color.

There is a pause for consideration from this industrious, hopeless, endless work of recovery, as
though the speaker could step back from it all, gaze detachedly on the ruins as she once had on
the Forum. How does the word 'pithy' strike you there? 'Acanthine' hair is both an exact
description of sculptured curls which mimic the curved, acanthus-leaf carving above classical
columns, and an echo from 'Full Fathom Five', where the seagod's hair extends for miles.

12
The strength of Plath's poem, it seems to me, is that it not only concerns the parent-child
relationship, rooted in personal circumstance yet sufficiently unspecific here to allow readers to
share the disturbance and pain inherent in the process of apparently unending search, but also
that it can be interpreted in a wider sense of a culture's lost direction. Without making grandiose
claims for the poem, I think that the sense of irreparable damage done by the two world wars in
this century--'more than a lightning-strike'-- to an ideal of Western civilization, based on classical
foundations, is certainly a presence in the poem. We will return to this matter of Plath's historical
imagination.
Working against the 'stony' imagery, the unyielding coldness of the male colossus, are the
involuntarily comic noises it emits, and then its fertility and colour by association. 'Cornucopia'
gives us an image of the whorled shell of the ear: the horn of plenty in painting spills its fruit, and
here we have the surprisingly luscious stars. Is this gesture, sheltering in the remains of
something that once sheltered her, a move back into childhood, a terrible admission ('I crawl') of
the need for security? We need to judge this in order to know how to read the close of the poem.
'And the long shadows cast by unseen figures -- human or of stone it is impossible to tell' -- Plath
thus described de Chirico (Journals, p. 211). 'My hours are married to shadow': her days are given
over to effort that makes no impression, the work of 'an ant in mourning'. It is not possible, I
think, to see that as a fruitful effort, although one critic has valiantly maintained that the stone
figure, while obstructive, is imperfect, and that the last lines should be read as those of a woman
who is no longer content to wait. That seems to go against the grain of the poem: the speaker has
given up waiting because she no longer hopes for rescue. There is a sense of exhaustion; the
woman herself is perhaps only a 'shadow' of her former self. The landing stones are 'blank' of
promise; she will not be setting sail.

From Sylvia Plath. Buckingham: Open University Press, 1992. Copyright 1992 by
Robyn Marsack.

On "Lady Lazarus"

Robert Phillips
She fears, in "Sheep in Fog," that her search will lead instead to a "starless and fatherless"
heaven, carrying her into dark waters. Such dark waters are the subject of "Lady Lazarus," a
much-quoted poem in which Plath compares herself to that Biblical figure once resurrected by
Christ (and to a cat with its nine lives) because she has been "resurrected" from attempted
suicide three times. The poem is also an act of revenge on the male Ego:

Out of the ash

I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.

From "The Dark Tunnel: A Reading of Sylvia Plath." Modern Poetry Studies 3.2
(1972).

Eillen M. Aird
A companion piece to 'Daddy', in which the poet again fuses the worlds of personal pain and
corporate suffering, is Lady Lazarus'. In this poem a disturbing tension is established between
the seriousness of the experience described and the misleadingly light form of the poem. The
vocabulary and rhythms which approximate to the colloquial simplicity of conversational speech,
the frequently end-stopped lines, the repetitions which have the effect of mockingly
counteracting the violence of the meaning, all establish the deliberately flippant note which this

13
poem strives to achieve. These are all devices which also operate in Auden's 'light verse', but the
constantly shifting tone of 'Lady Lazarus' is found less frequently in Auden's more cerebral
poetry. At times the tone is hysterically strident and demanding:

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.

Then it modulates into a calmer irony as the persona mocks herself for her pretensions to
tragedy: 'Dying/is an art, like everything else./I do it exceptionally well.' As in 'Daddy' Sylvia
Plath has used a limited amount of autobiographical detail in this poem; the references to suicide
in 'Lady Lazarus reflect her own experience. As in 'Daddy, however, the personal element is
subordinate to a much more inclusive dramatic structure, and one answer to those critics who have
seen her work as merely confessional is that she used her personal and painful material as a way of
entering into and illustrating much wider themes and subjects. In 'Lady Lazarus' the poet again
equates her suffering with the experiences of the tortured Jews, she becomes, as a result of the
suicide she inflicts on herself, 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.

The reaction of the crowd who push in with morbid interest to see the saved suicide mimics the
attitude of many to the revelations of the concentration camps; there is a brutal insistence on the
pain which many apparently manage to see with scientific detachment. Lady Lazarus represents an
extreme use of the 'light verse' technique. Auden never forced such grotesque material into such
an insistently jaunty poem, and the anger and compassion which inform the poem are rarely found
so explicitly in his work. 'Lady Lazarus' is also a supreme example of Sylvia Plath's skill as an
artist. She takes very personal, painful material and controls and forms it with the utmost rigour
into a highly wrought poem, which is partly effective because of the polar opposition between the
terrible gaiety of its form and the fiercely uncompromising seriousness of its subject. If we
categorize a poem such as 'Lady Lazarus' as 'confessional' or 'extremist then we highlight only
one of its elements. It is also a poem of social criticism with a strong didactic intent, and a work
of art which reveals great technical and intellectual ability. The hysteria is intentional and
effective.

From Sylvia Plat: Her Life and Work. Copyright 1973 by Eileen M. Aird

Margaret Dickie
Plaths late poems are full of speakers whose rigid identities and violent methods not only parody
their torment but also permit them to control it. The peculiar nature of the speaker in "Lady
Lazarus" defies ordinary notions of the suicide. Suicide is not the joyous act she claims it to be in

14
her triumphant assertion that she has done it again. Her confidence, at the moment of recovery,
that her sour breath will vanish in a day and that she will soon be a smiling woman is a perverse
acceptance of her rescuers' hopes, although she calls her rescuers enemies. The impulse of the
speaker is the overwhelming desire to control the situation. She is above all a performer, chiefly
remarkable for her manipulation of herself as well as of the effects she wishes to have on those
who surround her. She speaks of herself in hyperboles, calling herself a "walking miracle," boasting
that she has "nine times to die," exclaiming that dying is an art she does "exceptionally well,"
asserting that "the theatrical/ Comeback in broad day" knocks her out. Her treatment of suicide
in such buoyant terms amounts to a parody of her own act. When she compares her suicide to the
victimization of the Jews, and when she later claims there is a charge for a piece of her hair or
clothes and thus compares her rescued self to the crucified Christ or martyred saint, she is
engaging in self-parody. She employs these techniques partly to defy the crowd, with its "brute /
Amused shout:/ 'A miracle!' " and partly to taunt her rescuers, "Herr Doktor," "Herr Enemy," who
regard her as their "opus." She is neither a miracle nor an opus, and she fends off those who
would regard her in this way.
The techniques have another function as well: they display the extent to which she can objectify
herself, ritualize her fears, manipulate her own terror. Her extreme control is intimately entwined
with her suicidal tendencies. If she is not to succumb to her desire to kill herself and thus control
her own fate, she must engage in the elaborate ritual which goes on all the time in the mind of the
would-be suicide by which she allays her persistent wish to destroy herself. Her control is not
sane but hysterical . When the speaker assures the crowd that she is "the same, identical woman"
after her rescue, she is in fact telling them her inmost fear that she could (and probably will) do
it again. What the crowd takes for a return to health, the speaker sees as a return to the perilous
conditions that have driven her three times to suicide. By making a spectacle out of herself and by
locating the victimizer in the doctor and the crowd, rather than in herself, she is casting out her
terrors so that she can control them. When she boasts at the end that she will rise and eat men,
she is projecting her destruction outward. That last stanza of defiance is really a mental effort to
triumph over terror, to rise and not to succumb to her own victimization. The poet behind the
poem allows Lady Lazarus to caricature herself and thus to demonstrate the way in which the mind
turns ritualistic against horror. Although "Lady Lazarus" draws on Plath's own suicide attempt, the
poem tells us little of the actual event. It is not a personal confession, but it does reveal Plath's
understanding of the way the suicidal person thinks.

From Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Copyright 1979 by the Board of Trustees of
the University of Illinois.

Arthur Oberg
"Lady Lazarus" and "Daddy" are poems which seem written at the edge of sensibility and of
imagistic technique. They both utilize an imagery of severe disintegration and dislocation. The
public horrors of the Nazi concentration camps and the personal horrors of fragmented identities
become interchangeable. Men are reduced to parts of bodies and to piles of things. The movement
in each poem is at once historical and private; the confusion in these two spheres suggests the
extent to which this century has often made it impossible to separate them.
The barkerlike tone of "Lady Lazarus" is not accidental. As in "Daddy," the persona strips herself
before the reader ... all the time utilizing a cool or slang idiom in order to disguise feeling. Sylvia
Plath borrowed from a sideshow or vaudeville world the respect for virtuosity which the
performer must acquire, for which the audience pays and never stops paying. Elsewhere in her
work, she admired the virtuosity of the magician's unflinching girl or of the unshaking tattoo
artist. Here, in "Lady Lazarus," it is the barker and the striptease artist who consume her
attention. What the poet pursues in image and in rhyme (for example, the rhyming of "Jew" and
"gobbledygoo") becomes part of the same process I observed in so many of her other poems, that
attempt, brilliant and desperate, to locate what it was that hurt.

15
Sylvia Plath never stopped recording in her poetry the wish and need to clear a space for love. Yet
she joined this to an inclination to see love as unreal, to accompanying fears of being unable to give
and receive love, and to the eventual distortion and displacement of love in the verse. Loving
completely or "wholly" she considered to be dangerous, from her earliest verse on.
[. . . .]
Poems like"Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus in the end may not be the triumphs which their momentum
and inventiveness at times celebrate. Instead, and this is my sense of them, they belong more to
elegy and to death, to the woman whose "loving associations" abandoned her as she sought to
create images for them.

From Modern American Lyric: Lowell, Berryman, Creeley,-and Plath . Rutgers

University Press, 1978

Jon Rosenblatt
. . . The poem reflects Plath's recognition at the end of her life that the struggle between self
and others and between death and birth must govern every aspect of the poetic structure. The
magical and demonic aspects of the world appear in "Lady Lazarus" with an intensity that is absent
from "The Stones."
The Lady of the poem is a quasi-mythological figure, a parodic version of the biblical Lazarus whom
Christ raised from the dead. As in "The Stones," the speaker undergoes a series of
transformations that are registered through image sequences. The result is the total alteration of
the physical body. In "Lady Lazarus," however, the transformations are more violent and more
various than in "The Stones," and the degree of self-dramatization on the part of the speaker is
much greater. Four basic sequences of images define the Lady's identity. At the beginning of the
poem, she is cloth or material: lampshade, linen, napkin; in the middle, she is only body: knees, skin
and bone, hair; toward the end, she becomes a physical object: gold, ash, a cake of soap; finally,
she is resurrected as a red-haired demon. Each of these states is dramatically connected to an
observer or observers through direct address: first, to her unnamed "enemy"; then, to the
"gentlemen and ladies"; next, to the Herr Doktor; and, finally, to Herr God and Herr Lucifer. The
address to these "audiences" allows Plath to characterize Lady Lazarus's fragmented identities
with great precision. For example, a passage toward the end of the poem incorporates the
transition from a sequence of body images (scars-heart-hair) to a series of physical images" (opus-
valuable-gold baby) as it shifts its address from the voyeuristic crowd to the Nazi Doktor:

[lines 61-70]

The inventiveness of the language demonstrates Plath's ability to create, as she could not in "The
Stones," an appropriate oral medium for the distorted mental states of the speaker. The sexual
pun on "charge" in the first line above; the bastardization of German ("Herr Enemy"); the
combination of Latinate diction ("opus," "valuable") and colloquial phrasing ("charge," "So, so . . . ")
all these linguistic elements reveal a character who has been grotesquely split into warring
selves. Lady Lazarus is a different person for each of her audiences, and yet none of her
identities is bearable for her. For the Nazi Doktor, she is a Jew, whose body must be burned; for
the "peanut-crunching crowd," she is a stripteaser; for the medical audience, she is a wonder,
whose scars and heartbeat are astonishing; for the religious audience, she is a miraculous figure,
whose hair and clothes are as valuable as saints' relics. And when she turns to her audience in the
middle of the poem to describe her career in suicide, she becomes a self-conscious performer.
Each of her deaths, she says, is done "exceptionally well. / I do it so it feels like hell."
The entire symbolic procedure of death and rebirth in "Lady Lazarus" has been deliberately
chosen by the speaker. She enacts her death repeatedly in order to cleanse herse1f of the
"million filaments" of guilt and anguish that torment her. After she has returned to the womblike
state of being trapped in her cave, like the biblical Lazarus, or of being rocked "shut as a
seashell," she expects to emerge reborn in a new form. These attempts at rebirth are

16
unsuccessful until the end of the poem. Only when the Lady undergoes total immolation of self and
body does she truly emerge in a demonic form. The doctor burns her down to ash, and then she
achieves her rebirth:

Out of the ash

I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.

Using the phoenix myth of resurrection as a basis, Plath imagines a woman who has become pure
spirit rising against the imprisoning others around her: gods, doctor, men, and Nazis. This
translation of the self into spirit, after an ordeal of mutilation, torture, and immolation, stamps
the poem as the dramatization of the basic initiatory process.
"Lady Lazarus" defines the central aesthetic principles of Plath's late poetry. First, the poem
derives its dominant effects from the colloquial language. From the conversational opening ("I
have done it again") to the clipped warnings of the ending ("Beware / Beware"), "Lady Lazarus"
appears as the monologue of a woman speaking spontaneously out of her pain and psychic
disintegration. The Latinate terms ("annihilate," "filaments," "opus," "valuable") are introduced as
sudden contrasts to the essentially simple language of the speaker. The obsessive repetition of
key words and phrases gives enormous power to the plain style used throughout. As she speaks,
Lady Lazarus seems to gather up her energies for an assault on her enemies, and the staccato
repetitions of phrases build up the intensity of feelings:

[lines 46-50]

This is language poured out of some burning inner fire, though it retains the rhythmical precision
that we expect from a much less intensely felt expression. It is also a language made up almost
entirely of monosyllables. Plath has managed to adapt a heightened conversational stance and a
colloquial idiom to the dramatic monologue form.
The colloquial language of the poem relates to its second major aspect: its aural quality. "Lady
Lazarus" is meant to be read aloud. To heighten the aural effect, the speaker's, voice modulates
across varying levels of rhetorical intensity. At one moment she reports on her suicide attempt
with no observable emotion:

I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.
This is Number Three.

The next moment she becomes a barker at a striptease show:

Gentlemen, ladies,
These are my hands.

Then she may break into a kind of incantatory chant that sweeps reality in front of it, as at the
very end of the poem. The deliberate rhetoric of the poem marks it as a set-piece, a dramatic
tour de force, that must be heard to be truly appreciated. Certainly it answers Plath's desire to
create an aural medium for her poetry.
Third, "Lady Lazarus" transforms a traditional stanzaic pattern to obtain its rhetorical and aural
effects. One of the striking aspects of Plath's late poetry is its simultaneous dependence on and
abandonment of traditional forms. The three-line stanza of "Lady Lazarus" and such poems as
"Ariel," "Fever 103," "Mary's Song," and "Nick and the Candlestick" refer us inevitably to the
terza rima of the Italian tradition and to the terza rima experiments of Plath's earlier work. But
the poems employ this stanza only as a general framework for a variable-beat line and variable
rhyming patterns. The first stanza of the poem has two beats in its first line, three in its second,
and two in its third; but the second has a five-three-two pattern. The iambic measure is dominant

17
throughout, though Plath often overloads a line with stressed syllables or reduces a line to a single
stress. The rhymes are mainly off-rhymes ("again," "ten"; "fine," "linen"; "stir," "there"). Many of
the pure rhymes are used to accentuate a bizarre conjunction of meaning, as in the lines
addressed to the doctor: "I turn and burn. / Do not think I underestimate your great concern."
Finally, "Lady Lazarus," like "Daddy" and "Fever 103," incorporates historical material into the
initiatory and imagistic patterns. This element of Plath's method has generated much
misunderstanding, including the charge that her use of references to Nazism and to Jewishness is
inauthentic. Yet these allusions to historical events form part of the speaker's fragmented
identity and allow Plath to portray a kind of eternal victim. The very title of the poem lays the
groundwork for a semicomic historical and cultural allusiveness. The Lady is a legendary figure, a
sufferer, who has endured almost every variety of torture. Plath can thus include among Lady
Lazarus's characteristics the greatest contemporary examples of brutality and persecution: the
sadistic medical experiments on the Jew's by Nazi doctors and the Nazis' use of their victims'
bodies in the production of lampshades and other objects. These allusions, however, are no more
meant to establish a realistic historic norm in the poem than the allusions to the striptease are
intended to establish a realistic social context. The references in the poembiblical, historical,
political, personaldraw the reader into the center of a personality and its characteristic mental
processes. The reality of the poem lies in the convulsions of the narrating consciousness. The
drama of external persecution, self-destructiveness, and renewal, with both its horror and its
grotesque comedy, is played out through social and historical contexts that symbolize the inner
struggle of Lady Lazarus.
The claim that Plath misuses a particular historical experience is thus incorrect. She shows how a
contemporary consciousness is obsessed with historical and personal demons and how that
consciousness deals with these figures. The demonic characters of the Nazi Doktor and of the
risen Lady Lazarus are surely more central to the poem's tone and intent than is the historicity of
these figures. By imagining the initiatory drama against the backdrop of Nazism, Plath is
universalizing a personal conflict that is treated more narrowly in such poems as "The Bee-
Meeting" and "Berck-Plage." The fact that Plath herself was not Jewish has no bearing on the
legitimacy of her employment of the Jewish persona: the holocaust serves her as a metaphor for
the death-and-life battle between the self and a deadly enemy. Whether Plath embodies the
enemy as a personal friend, a demonic entity, a historical figure, or a cosmic force, she
consistently sees warfare in the structural terms of the initiatory scenario. "Lady Lazarus" is
simply the most powerful and successful of the dramas in which that enemy appears as the
sadistic masculine force of Nazism.

from Sylvia Plath: The Poetry of Initiation. Copyright 1979 by University of

North Carolina Press.

Helen Vendler
"Lady Lazarus," written in the same feverish thirtieth-birthday month that produced "Daddy" and
"Ariel," is a mlange of incompatible styles, as though in a meaningless world every style could have
its day: bravado ("I have done it again"), slang ("A sort of walking miracle"), perverse fashion
commentary ("my skin/Bright as a Nazi lampshade"), melodrama ("Do I terrify?"), wit ("like the cat
I have nine times to die"), boast ("This is Number Three"), self-disgust ("What a trash/To
annihilate each decade"). The poem moves on through reductive dismissal ("The big strip tease") to
public announcement, with a blasphemous swipe at the ecce homo ("Gentlemen, ladies/These are
my hands/My knees"), and comes to its single lyric moment, recalling Plath's suicide attempt in the
summer before her senior year at Smith:

I rocked shut

18
 As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

Almost every stanza of "Lady Lazarus" picks up a new possibility for this theatrical voice, from
mock movie talk ("So, so, Herr Doktor./So, Herr Enemy") to bureaucratic politeness, ("Do not
think I underestimate your great concern") to witch warnings ("I rise with my red hair/And I eat
men like air"). When an author makes a sort of headcheese of style in this way--a piece of gristle,
a piece of meat, a piece of gelatin, a piece of rind--the disbelief in style is countered by a
competitive faith in it. Style (as something consistent) is meaningless, but styles (as dizzying
provisional skepticism) are all.
Poems like "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus" are in one sense demonically intelligent, in their wanton play
with concepts, myths, and language, and in another, and more important, sense not intelligent at all,
in that they willfully refuse, for the sale of a cacophony of styles (a tantrum of style), the steady,
centripetal effect of thought. Instead, they display a wild dispersal, a centrifugal spin to further
and further reaches of outrage. They are written in a loud version of what Plath elsewhere calls
"the zoo yowl, the mad soft/ Mirror talk you love to catch me at." And that zoo yowl has a feral
slyness about it.

From "An Intractable Metal." The New Yorker (1982).

Paul Breslin
"Lady Lazarus," another anthology-piece, reveals that this vacillation has, in addition to its
misplaced mimetic function, a rhetorical function as well. This poem, much more overtly than
"Daddy," anticipates and manipulates the responses of the reader. The speaker alternately solicits
our sympathy and rebukes us for meddling. "Do I terrify?" she asks; she certainly hopes so. By
comparing her recovery from a suicide attempt to the resurrection of Lazarus, she imagines
herself as the center of a spectaclewe envision Christ performing a miracle before the
astonished populace of Bethany. But unlike the beneficiary of the biblical miracle, Plath's "lady
Lazarus" accomplishes her own resurrection and acknowledges no power greater than herself.
"Herr God; Herr Lucifer, I Beware I Beware," she warns. Her self-aggrandizing gestures invite
attention, and yet we are to be ashamed of ourselves if we accept the invitation:

The peanut-crunching crowd

Shoves in to see

Them unwrap me hand and foot

The big strip-tease.

The crowd is aggressive ("shoves"), its interest lascivious; it seeks an illicit titillation, if not from
the speaker's naked body, then from her naked psyche.
Again, one might argue that the divided tone of "Lady Lazarus" is a legitimately mimetic
representation of the psychology of suicide. A suicide attempt is partly motivated by the wish to
get attention and exact revenge on those who have withheld attention in the past by making them
feel responsible for one's death. Those who attempt suicide in a manner unlikely to succeedand
Plath 's attempts, including the successful one, seem to have been intended to failare torn
between the desire "to last it out and not come back at all" and the hope that someone will care
enough to intervene. Moreover, a suicide attempt is itself a confession, a public admission of
inward desperation: Recovering from such an attempt, one would have to contend with the
curiosity aroused in other people. One might indeed feel stripped naked, sorry to have called so
much attention to oneself, and yet suddenly powerful in commanding so much attention.

19
Plath's analogy of the strip-tease or the sideshow conveys, with force and precision, the
ambivalence of suicidal despair. Had she extended that metaphor through the entire poem, holding
its complexities in balance, "Lady Lazarus" might have achieved the stability of tone and judgment
lacking in "Daddy." But unfortunately, Plath succumbed to the urge to whip up further lurid
excitement with the analogy of the concentration camp, introduced in stanzas two and three but
dormant thereafter until it returns at the end of stanza twenty-one. It reenters stealthily:

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.

The first five lines of this passage, which continue the metaphor of strip-tease or freak show, are
witty and self-possessed in their bitterness. "Large charge" is of course, slang for "big thrill" and
so glances at the titillation the audience receives as well as the price of admission. But with "a bit
of blood / Or a piece of my hair or my clothes," we suddenly recall the "Nazi lampshade" of stanza
two. The speaker's "enemy"' whether it be Herr God, Herr Lucifer, or the peanut-crunching
crowd, would kill her and dismember the body for commodities (or, in the context of biblical
miracle, relics; in either case she is martyred). Interestingly, as the irony becomes less controlled,
more phantasmagorical and unhinged, the rhythm begins to fall into anapests, and the rhyme on
"goes" and "clothes" is one of the most insistent in the poem. The sound of the poetry, reminiscent
of light verse, combines strangely with its macabre sense, rather like certain passages in "The
Raven" where one feels that Poe has been demonically possessed by W. S. Gilbert ("For we cannot
help agreeing that no living human being / Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber
door").
In the last twenty lines of "Lady Lazarus," irony vanishes, its last glimmer coming ten lines from
the end in "Do not think I underestimate your great concern." By this point, the speaker has
turned from the crowd to address a single threatening figure:

So, so, Herr Doktor

So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus,
I am your valuable
The pure gold baby. . . .

The enemy, hitherto unspecified, turns out to be a German male authority figure, perhaps a
scholar like Otto Plath ("Herr Doktor"), who thinks of the speaker as his "pure gold baby." An
inward confrontation with this father imago replaces the confrontation with the intrusive crowd.
The poem enters a realm of pure fantasy as the "Herr Doktor" rapidly assumes the cosmic
proportions of "Herr God, Herr Lucifer." There is also a shift in the figurative language,
corresponding to the shift in tone and implied audience. The clammy imagery of "the grave cave"
and "worms . . . like sticky pearls" gives way to an imagery of death by fire. The resurrection of
Lazarus becomes the birth of the Phoenix, and the extended metaphor of a public spectacle
abruptly disappears. The threat of the final line, "And I eat men like air" (SP, 247), has little
connection with anything in the first twenty-one stanzas.

20
As with "Daddy," one may try to save consistency by declaring the speaker a "persona." The poem,
by this reckoning, reveals a woman gradually caught up in her anger and carried by it toward a
recognition of its true object: not the crowd of insensitive onlookers, but the father and husband
who have driven her to attempt suicide. The end of the poem, thus understood, breaks free of
defensive irony to release cathartic rage. But it is hard to see why this rage is cathartic, since it
no sooner locates its "real" object than it begins to convert reality back into fantasy again, in a
grandiose and finally evasive fashion. Was it that Plath unconsciously doubted her right to be
angry and therefore had to convict her father and her husband of Hitlerian monstrosities in order
to justify the anger she nonetheless felt? Or did she fear that the experiential grounds of her
emotions were too personal for art unless mounted on the stilts of myth or psycho-historical
analogy? On such questions one can only speculate, and the answers, even if they were obtainable,
could illuminate the poems only as biographical evidence, not as poems.

from The Psycho-Political Muse: American Poetry since the Fifties . Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1987. Copyright 1987 by the U of Chicago P.

Kathleen Margaret Lant

"Purdah" and "Lady Lazarus" - written within a week of each other during October 1962 - further
reveal Plath's conviction that undressing has become for her a powerful poetic gesture, and in
these poems it is the female speaker who finally disrobes - and here she attempts to appropriate
the power of nakedness for herself. Plath does not simply contemplate from the spectator's point
of view the horrors and the vigor of the act of undressing; now her female subject dares to make
herself naked, and she does so in an attempt to make herself mighty. At this point, nakedness has
somehow become strongly assertive, at least at one level in these poems. "Purdah" and "Lady
Lazarus" take up the power of the uncovered body that Plath began to explore in "A Birthday
Present." But in these two later poems, that figurative nakedness is compromised by the
metaphorical significance of the female body. The naked force in "A Birthday Present" is
ultimately masculine since it has the potential to enter the speaker like a cruelly sharp knife; the
body that is unclothed encodes the assertiveness of the revealed male body. The body made bare
in "Lady Lazarus" and "Purdah," however, is female, and for that reason the power of that body's
undraping must be - at least in terms of Plath's metaphorical universe - necessarily diminished.
[. . . . ]
"Lady Lazarus" conveys the same sense of confusion or ambivalence in that the power of the
speaking subject of the poem seems undermined by the melodramatic unclothing of that subject.
Lady Lazarus is clearly - like the speaker of "Purdah" - meant to threaten; she asks rather
sarcastically, "Do I terrify?", but the language by means of which she shapes her unclothing seems
to compromise the grandeur of her act. She is not covered by grime or grit or falseness; her
covering is somehow already too feminine, too ineffectual: My face a featureless, fine / Jew
linen. // Peel off the napkin" (244). "Lady Lazarus" presents most clearly one of the central
problems with Plath's use of the metaphor of nakedness, for in this poem Plath refers to this act
of unclothing as "The big strip tease." And in this act, no woman is terrifying, no woman is
triumphant, no woman is powerful, for she offers herself to "the peanut-crunching crowd" in a
gesture that is "theatrical" (245) rather than self-defining, designed to please or to appease her
viewers more than to release herself.
To strip is to seduce; it is not to assert oneself sexually or psychologically. And by the end of the
poem, the speaker seeks to shame the male viewer who is exploiting her; she threatens him openly:
"Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air" (247). But the threat is empty.
Alicia Ostriker observes, too, that the rage here is "hollow" because the reader is fully aware that
the speaker of this poem "is powerless, she knows it, she hates it" (102). But Ostriker does not
name the source of this powerlessness - the speaker's physical vulnerability. The female subject
has offered here pieces of herself, she has displayed herself not in an assertive way but in a
sexually provocative and seductive way, and - at the very end - she resorts to descriptions of her

21
appearance - her red hair - but not delineations of her reality - her anger. She does not convince
the audience that she is, in fact, dangerous, for she must offer the female body as an object
rather than assert it as a weapon. It is telling, too, that the speaker's audience in "Lady Lazarus"
is made up entirely of men (Herr God, Herr Lucifer, Herr Doktor), for by revealing herself only
before such an audience, she ensures that her unveiling will be read not as a powerful assertion of
identity but rather as a seductive gesture of submission and invitation.

from "The big strip tease: female bodies and male power in the poetry of Sylvia
Plath." Contemporary Literature 34.4 (Winter 1993)

Al Strangeways
In "Lady Lazarus," for example, Plath collapses the "them and us" distinction by confronting
readers with their voyeurism in looking at the subject of the poem. To apply Teresa De Lauretis's
theorizing of the cinematic positioning of women to Plath's poem, in "Lady Lazarus," the speaker's
consciousness of her performance for the readers (who are implicitly part of the "peanut-
crunching crowd") works to reverse the gaze of the readers so that they become "overlooked in
the act of overlooking."
By extension, in her parodic overstatement (Lady Lazarus as archetypal victim, archetypal object
of the gaze) Plath highlights the performative (that is, constructed rather than essential) nature
of the speaker's positioning as object of the gaze, and so (to extend Judith Butler's terms), Lady
Lazarus enacts a performance that attempts to "compel a reconsideration of the place and
stability" of her positioning, and to "enact and reveal the performativity" of her representation.
This sense of performativity and the reversal of gaze likewise extends, in "Lady Lazarus," to
compel reconsideration not only of the conventional positioning of the woman as object, and of the
voyeurism implicit in all lyric poetry, but also of the historical metaphors as objects of the gaze.
Readers feel implicated in the poem's straightforward assignment and metaphorizing of the
speaker in her role as object and performer, and contingently are made to feel uncomfortable
about their similar easy assimilation of the imagery (of the suffering of the Jews) that the
speaker uses. In "Daddy," a similar relationship between reader, speaker, and metaphor is at work.

From "Boot in the Face: The Problem of the Holocaust in the Poetry of Sylvia
Plath." Contemporary Literature 37.3 (Fall 1996).

Christina Britzolakis
Although Plath's 'confessional' tropes are often seen in terms of a Romantic parable of
victimization, whether of the sensitive poetic individual crushed by a brutally rationalized society,
or of feminist protest against a monolithic patriarchal oppressor, her self-reflexivity tends to
turn confession into a parody gesture or a premiss for theatrical performance. The central
instance of the 'confessional' in her writing is usually taken to be 'Lady Lazarus'. M. L. Rosenthal
uses the poem to validate the generic category: 'Robert Lowell's 'Skunk Hour' and Sylvia Plath's
'Lady Lazarus' are true examples of 'confessional' poetry because they put the speaker himself
at the centre of the poem in such a way as to make his psychological shame and vulnerability an
embodiment of his civilization.' The confessional reading of the poem is usually underpinned by the
recourse to biography, which correlates the speaker's cultivation of the 'art of dying' with Plath's
suicidal career. Although Plath is indeed, at one level, mythologizing her personal history, the
motif of suicide in 'Lady Lazarus' operates less as self-revelation than as a theatrical tour de
force, a music-hall routine.
With 'Daddy', 'Lady Lazarus' is probably the single text in the Plath canon which has attracted
most disapproval on the grounds of a manipulative, sensationalist, or irresponsible style. Helen
Vendler, for example, writes that 'Style (as something consistent) is meaningless, but styles (as

22
dizzying provisional scepticism) are all . . . Poems like 'Daddy' and 'Lady Lazarus' are in one sense
demonically intelligent, in their wanton play with concepts, myths and language, and in another, and
more important, sense, not intelligent at all, in that they wilfully refuse, for the sake of a
cacophony of styles (a tantrum of style), the steady, centripetal effect of thought. Instead, they
display a wild dispersal, a centrifugal spin to further and further reaches of outrage.' Here, the
element of 'wilful' pastiche in 'Lady Lazarus' is measured against a normative ideal of aesthetic
detachment. Yet the poem's ironic use of prostitution as the figure of a particular kind of
theatricalized self-consciousnessof the poet as, in Plath's phrase, 'Roget's trollop, parading
words and tossing off bravado for an audience' (JP 2I4)calls for a reading which takes seriously
what the poem does with, and to, literary history.
Like 'Lesbos', 'Lady Lazarus' is a dramatic monologue which echoes and parodies 'The Love Song
of J. AIfred Prufrock'. The title alludes, of course, not only to the biblical story of Lazarus but
also to Prufrock's lines: 'I am Lazarus, come from the dead, | Come back to tell you all, I shall tell
you all'. Like Eliot, Plath uses clothing as a metaphor for rhetoric: the 'veil' or 'garment' of style.
By contrast with Eliot's tentative hesitations, obliquities, and evasions of direct statement,
however, Plath's poem professes to 'tell all'. Lady Lazarus deploys a patently alienated and
manufactured language, in which the shock tactic, the easy effect, reign supreme. Her rhetoric is
one of direct statement ('I have done it again'), of brutal Americanisms ('trash', 'shoves', 'the
big strip tease', 'I do it so it feels like hell', 'knocks me out'), of glib categorical assertions and
dismissals ('Dying is an art, like everything else') , and blatant internal rhymes ('grave cave', 'turn
and burn'). As Richard Blessing remarks, both 'Lady Lazarus' and 'The Applicant' are poems that
parody advertising techniques while simultaneously advertising themselves. The poet who reveals
her suffering plays to an audience, or 'peanut-crunching crowd'; her miraculous rebirths are
governed by the logic of the commodity. Prufrock is verbally overdressed but feels emotionally
naked and exposed, representing himself as crucified before the gaze of the vulgar mass. Lady
Lazarus, on the other hand, incarnates the 'holy prostitution of the soul' which Baudelaire found
in the experience of being part of a crowd; emotional nakedness is itself revealed as a
masquerade. The 'strip-tease' artist is a parodic, feminized version of the symbolist poet
sacrificed to an uncomprehending mass audience. For Baudelaire, as Walter Benjamin argues, the
prostitute serves as an allegory of the fate of aesthetic experience in modernity, of its
'prostitution' to mass culture. The prostitute deprives femininity of its aura, its religious and
cultic presence; the woman's body becomes a commodity, made up of dead and petrified
fragments, while her beauty becomes a matter of cosmetic disguise (make-up and fashion).
Baudelaire's prostitute sells the appearance of femininity. But she also offers a degraded and
hallucinated memory of fulfilment, an intoxicating or narcotic substitute for the idealized
maternal body. For the melancholic, spleen-ridden psyche, which obsessively dwells on the broken
pieces of the past, she is therefore a privileged object of meditation. She represents the loss of
that blissful unity with nature and God which was traditionally anchored in a female figure.
Instead, Benjamin argues, the prostitute, like commodity fetishism, harnesses the 'sex-appeal of
the inorganic', which binds the living body to the realm of death.
Lady Lazarus is an allegorical figure, constructed from past and present images of femininity,
congealed fantasies projected upon the poem's surface. She is a pastiche of the numerous deathly
or demonic women of poetic tradition, such as Foe's Ligeia, who dies and is gruesomely revivified
through the corpse of another woman. Ligeia's function, which is to be a symbol, mediating
between the poet and 'supernal beauty', can only be preserved by her death. Similarly, in
Mallarme's prose poem 'Le Phenomene Futur', the 'Woman of the Past' is scientifically preserved
and displayed at a circus sideshow by the poet. For Plath, however, the woman on show, the
'female phenomenon' is a revelation of unnaturalness instead of sensuous nature, her body
gruesomely refashioned into Nazi artefacts. Lady Lazarus yokes together the canonical post-
Romantic, symbolist tradition which culminates in 'Prufrock', and the trash culture of True
Confessions, through their common concern with the fantasizing and staging of the female body:

I rocked shut

23
 As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

The densely layered intertextual ironies at work in these lines plot the labyrinthine course of what
Benjamin calls 'the sex appeal of the inorganic' through literary history. They echo Ariel's song in
The Tempest, whose talismanic status in Plath's writing I have already noted. Plath regenders the
image, substituting Lady Lazarus for the drowned corpse of the father/king. The metaphor of the
seashell converts the female body into a hardened, dead and inorganic object, but at the same
time nostalgically recalls the maternal fecundity of the sea. The dead woman who suffers a sea
change is adorned with phallic worms turned into pearls, the 'sticky', fetishistic sublimates of
male desire. In Marvell's poem of seduction, 'To His Coy Mistress', the beloved is imagined as a
decaying corpse: 'Nor, in thy marble vault shall sound | My echoing song: then worms shall try |
That long-preserved virginity: | And your quaint honour turn to dust; | And into ashes all my lust.'
In T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, the refrain 'Those are pearls that were his eyes' is associated
with the drowned Phoenician sailor, implicit victim of witch-like, neurotic, or soul-destroying
female figures, such as Madame Sosostris and Cleopatra.
Lady Lazarus stages the spectacle of herself, assuming the familiar threefold guise of actress,
prostitute, and mechanical woman. The myth of the eternally recurring feminine finds its
fulfilment in the worship and 'martyrdom' of the film or pop star, a cult vehicle of male fantasy
who induces mass hysteria and vampiric hunger for 'confessional' revelations. Lady Lazarus
reminds her audience that '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.' It is as if Plath is using the Marilyn Monroe
figure to travesty Poe's dictum in 'The Philosophy of Composition' (I846) that 'the death of a
beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world'. The proliferation of
intertextual ironies also affects the concluding transformation of 'Lady Lazarus' into the
phoenix-like, man-eating demon, who rises 'out of the ash' with her 'red hair'. This echoes
Coleridge's description of the possessed poet in 'Kubla Kahn': 'And all should cry Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!' The woman's hair, a privileged fetish-object of male fantasy,
becomes at once a badge of daemonic genius and a flag of vengeance. It is tempting to read these
lines as a personal myth of rebirth, a triumphant Romantic emergence of what Lynda Bundtzen
calls the female 'body of imagination'. The myth of the transcendent-demonic phoenix seems to
transcend the dualism of male-created images of women, wreaking revenge on 'Herr Doktor',
'Herr God', and 'Herr Lucifer', those allegorical emblems of an oppressive masculinity. Yet Lady
Lazarus's culminating assertion of power'I eat men like air'undoes itself, through its
suggestion of a mere conjuring trick. The attack on patriarchy is undercut by the illusionistic
character of this apotheosis which purports to transform, at a stroke, a degraded and
catastrophic reality. What the poem sarcastically 'confesses', through its collage of fragments of
'high' and 'low' culture, is a commodity status no longer veiled by the aura of the sacred. Lyric
inwardness is 'prostituted' to the sensationalism of 'true confession'. The poet can no longer
cherish the illusion of withdrawing into a pure, uncontaminated private space, whose immunity from
larger historical conflicts is guaranteed by the 'auratic' woman. . . .for Plath the female body, far
from serving as expiatory metaphor for the ravages of modernity, itself becomes a sign whose
cultural meanings are in crisis.

from Sylvia Plath and Theatre of Mourning. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999.
Copyright 1999 by Christina Bitzolkais

Susan Gubar

[NB. Prosopopoeia: a rhetorical figure involving the adoption of the voices of

the imagined, absent dead.]

24
If identification with the victims who could not disidentify with their tormentors constitutes the
trap of prosopopoeia in "Daddy," the trope functions as a trip in "Lady Lazarus." What does it
mean to think of the imperilled Jews asto borrow a phrase Maurice Blanchot used to approach
the complex subject of Holocaust-related suicidesfetishized "masters of un-mastery"? The
wronged speaker here can only liberate herself from "Herr Doktor" or "Herr Enemy" by wresting
the power of persecution from him and turning it against herself. We know that the ongoingness
of the torments of the Shoah perpetuated postwar suicides, but did those casualties mutate into
mystic scapegoats whose envied status as paradigmatic victims would in turn generate ersatz
survivor-celebrities? This is one way to grasp the shock of "Lady Lazarus," for the narcissistic and
masochistic speaker has become obsessed with dying, relates to it as "a call." With her skin
"Bright as a Nazi lampshade," her foot "A paperweight," and her face "featureless, fine / Jew
linen," Lady Lazarus puts her damage on theatrical display through her scandalous suicide artistry
(244). Have Jews been made to perform the Trauerspiel for a "peanut-crunching crowd" at the
movies and on TV, like the striptease entertainer through whom Plath speaks? Does Lady
Lazarus's "charge" at making death feel "real" and at "the theatrical / / Comeback" anticipate a
contemporary theatricalization of the Holocaust? Certainly, her vengeful warning that "there is a
charge / for the hearing of my heart" evokes the chargethe cheap thrill and the financial price
and the emotional costof installations, novels, testimonials, college courses, critical essays, and
museums dedicated to the six million.
The commodification of Lady Lazarus's exhibitionism issues in spectators paying "For a word or a
touch / Or a bit of blood / / Or a piece of my hair or my clothes"; she brags about her expertise
at the art of dying: "I do it so it feels like hell. / I do it so it feels real" (245, emphasis mine). The
spectacular quality of Plath's figure adumbrates the notorious celebrity of a writer like Benjamin
Wilkomirski, whose gruesome bestseller Fragments (about a child's experiences in the camps) was
praised as "free of literary artifice of any kind" before it was judged to be a fraud. In remarks
that gloss Plath's suicide-performer's pandering to her audience, Daniel Ganzfried argued that
Wilkomirski's suicide would be read as an authentication of his identity as a victim: "These people
talking about suicide will suggest it to him. . . . Some of his supporters would love him dead because
then it looks like proof that he's Wilkomirski." Plath's poetry broods uponjust as Ganzfried's
argument reiteratesthe contamination of the very idea of the genuine. As Blanchot cautions, " If
there is, among all words, one that is inauthentic, then surely it is the word 'authentic."' To the
extent that the impresario of Plath's stage, "Herr God" / "Herr Lucifer," has reduced Lady
Lazarus from a person to an "opus" or a "valuable," the poem hints that even reverential post-
Shoah remembrances may be always-already defiled by the Nazi perpetratorsthat prosopopoeia
will not enable the poet to transcend the tarnished uses to which the past has been, can be, will be
put. In the voice of a denizen of disaster, Plath mocks the frisson stimulated by the cultural
industry she herself helped to spawn.
Revolted by her own dehumanization, Lady Lazarus then imagines triumphing over the murderous
Nazis by turning vengeful herself, if only in the incendiary afterlife conferred by the oven:

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.

25
As it feeds on "men like air"predatory psychic dictators but also perhaps men turned to smoke
the red rage that rises out of the ashes only fuels self-combustion, debunking the idea of
transcendence or rebirth at the end of the poem. With its ironic echo of the conclusion of
Coleridge's "Kubla Kahn""Beware, beware, his flashing eyes, his floating hair""Lady Lazarus"
repudiates Romantic wonder at the power of the artist, replacing the magical "pleasure dome" of
his artifice with the detritus to which the Jewish people were reduced. The poem's speech act
amounts to a caustic assessment of the aesthetic sellout, the disaster-imposter luminary: "there
is nothing there." That no consensus exists among contemporary historians over whether the
Nazis made cakes of soap out of their victims (though they certainly did "manufacture" hair and
skin, rings and fillings and bones) drives home the bitter irony that propels the poem, namely that
imaginative approaches to the Shoah may distort, rather than safeguard, the dreadful but
shredded historical record. Reenactments of the calamity, including her own, are indicted, even as
Plath issues a warning that they will take their toll.
Will the figure of prosopopoeia, so seductive for poets from Jarrell and Plath to Simic and Rich,
outlive its functions as the Holocaust and its atrocities recede into a past to which no one alive
can provide firsthand testimony? Or will the imperatives of "post-memory" imbue this rhetorical
strategywhich insists on returning to the unbearable rupture of sufferingwith newfound
resonance once the Shoah can no longer be personally recalled? Given the passage of time as well
as the flood of depictions of the catastrophe, the very vacuity of the desecrated (buried alive,
incinerated, unburied, dismembered) bodies that licensed the personifications of prosopopoeia
may make verse epitaphs seem shoddily inadequate. Plath's taunting sneer"I turn and burn. / Do
not think I underestimate your great concern" (246)chronologically preceded the highly
profitable entertainment industry the Holocaust business has so recently become. However,
besides forecasting it, "Lady Lazarus" offers up a chilling warning about the fetishization of
suffering with which the figure of prosopopoeia flirts. Indeed, Plath's verse uncannily stages the
bases for accusations of exploitation, larceny, masochism, and sensationalism that would
increasingly accrue around Holocaust remembrance. In addition, her impersonation of the real
victims invariably generates awareness of the spurious representation put in the place of the
absence of evidence. Calling attention to what Geoffrey Hartman and Jean Baudrillard term our
propensity to adopt a "necrospective," poems deploying prosopopoeia draw us closer to an event
that is, simultaneously, distanced by their debased status as merely simulated and recycled image-
substitutions.

from "Prosopopoeia and Holocaust Poetry in English: Sylvia Plath and Her
Contemporaries." Yale Journal of Criticism (2001)

On "Black Rook in Rainy Weather"

Brita Lindberg-Seyersted
In 'Black Rook in Rainy Weather' the poet again musters up self-irony to face her urge to
commune with nature. She might wish to see 'some design' among the fallen leaves and receive
'some backtalk / From the mute sky,' but this, she knows, would be to expect a miracle. Still, she
leaves herself open to any minute gesture on the part of nature lending 'largesse, honor, / One
might say love even to the dullest landscape and the most ignorant viewer; this could be achieved,
for instance, by letting a black rook arrange its feathers in such a way as to captivate the
viewer's senses and so 'grant // A brief respite from fear / Of total neutrality.' The miracle has
not happened yet, but the hope of such a moment of transcendent beauty and communion is worth
the wait. She knows that it might in fact be only a trick of light which the viewer interprets as
'that rare, random descent of an angel.

From "Sylvia Plaths Psychic Landscapes." English Studies 71.6 (December 1990).

26
 Margaret Dickie
The rook in Plath's poem, arranging and rearranging its feathers, seems like the fastidious
spinster in comparison with Hughes's hawk. It is an object set out on the landscape for no
particular purpose, because Plath's real desire is "some backtalk/ From the mute sky." Neither
rook nor sky speaks, but the walker is very wordy, full of parenthetical phrases ("Although, I
admit, I desire," "At any rate, I now walk"), concerned not with the actual landscape but with her
own thoughts. She finally reattaches these thoughts to the landscape by saying,

I only know that a rook

Ordering its black feathers can so shine
As to seize my senses, haul
My eyelids up, and grant

A brief respite from fear

Of total neutrality.

The rook, then, is just a ploy, a common bird which serves only as the focus of a vision. No master-
fulcrum of violence in this landscape will ever compare to "that rare, random descent" of radiance
that hallows "an interval / Otherwise inconsequent."
[. . . .]
[Yet] "Miracles occur," she suggests hopefully. The fear of total neutrality can be relieved by
poetic vision . . . .

from Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Copyright 1979 by the Board of Trustees of
the University of Illinois.

Joanne Feit Diehl

When, in the old way, inspiration does occur, it releases consciousness from an ordinariness
experienced as devoid of meaning or purpose. . . .
The hope held out by such a descent depends upon the workings of the miraculous. Conjoined with
the passivity of awaiting a miracle, however, is an effortful resistance that has nothing to do with
grace.

... I only know that a rook

Ordering its black feathers can so shine
As to seize my senses, haul
My eyelids up, and grant

A brief respite from fear

Of total neutrality.

"Seize" and "haul," the verbs that Plath chooses to characterize the moment of Sublime
intervention, convey the rooks effect upon her as they suggest a resistance on her part, a
passivity that must be broken through. When this resistance combines with dread, Plath envisions
a world that will not break into moments of radiance but yields only absence, an absence
synonymous with a world untransformed by an imaginative power envisioned as having been created
by forces beyond the self.

... With luck,

Trekking stubborn through this season

27
 Of fatigue, I shall
Patch together a content

Of sorts. Miracles occur,

If you care to call those spasmodic
Tricks of radiance miracles. The waits begun again,
The long wait for the angel,
For that rare, random descent

The passivity associated with Plath's early understanding of imaginative creativity would later be
replaced by a conception of creative powers that originate from within. Such self-reliance,
however, depends upon a release from the early poems' fabric of identifications, where the
inspiratory powers of the imagination and the voice of poetic authority are both linked to forces
external to the self: to the male poet or to an aversive, hostile nature.
Only by reengendering the terms of these initial identifications can Plath escape the equation of
poetic inspiration as annunciation and the passivity it entails.

From Women Poets and the American Sublime. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990.
Copyright 1990 by Joanne Feit Diehl.

On "Tulips"

Jeannine Dobbs
In "Tulips" (Ariel), one of Plath's most popular poems, she uses a personal experience as a setting
to express the complexities that the idea of childlessness has for her. Ted Hughes says she wrote
"Tulips" after being hospitalized for an appendectomy in March of 1961. She had miscarried just a
short time before this operation; probably the second hospital confinement triggered associations
with death and birth. These tulips are "like an awful baby." There is something wild and dangerous
about them. She wants to reject them because she says they "eat my oxygen." She wants to
reject the tulips as she wants to reject the trappings of her life and the family she has:

Now I have lost myself, I am sick of baggage--

My husband and child smiling out of the family photo;
Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks.

Not tulips but death is the gift she wants, as in "A Birthday Present" ( Ariel), but in both cases the
irony is that the gift is life. What she finds in her rejection of the gift here is freedom, a kind of
perfection:

I didn't want any flowers. I only wanted

To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.
How free it is, you have no idea how free--

....
it is what the dead close on, finally. . . .

Her freedom is both wonderful and terrible because the price is so high. The woman must give up
her man and her child that hook onto her, as well as her things, her possessions. And the ultimate
price--and reward--is death.

From "Viciousness in the Kitchen: Sylvia Plaths Domestic Poetry." Modern

Language Studies 7.2 (1977).

28
 Eileen M. Aird
The world of the hospital ward is a welcome one of snowy whiteness and silence, in which the
woman grasps eagerly at the ability to relax completely because nothing is required of her. She
has moved beyond normal activity, and relishes the opportunity to relinquish all responsibility, to
become a 'body' with no personal identity:

I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the

nurses
And my history to the anaesthetist and my body to
surgeons.

The renunciation of individuality also includes the reduction of others to a depersonalised level, so
that they make no claims on her and she is aware of making none on them; consequently she sees
the nurses hurrying about the ward as being as alike as a flock of gulls flying inland. She sees
herself as an inanimate object, a, pebble. . . .
The tulips erupt into the whiteness of the microcosm the patient has created as a painful
reminder of the health which she consciously strives to reject. The world of Ariel is a black and
white one into which red, which represents blood, the heart and living is always an intrusion. The
tulips hurt beacuse they require the emotional response which will rouse her from the numbness
of complete mental and physical inactivity; she feels that the flowers have eyes which watch her
and increase her sense of her own unreality: And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper
shadow/ Between the eye of the sun and the eye of the tulips.' This sense of unreality, of
substancelessness, is not similar to the feeling of immersion in self which she has cultivated, it is
a sense of inadequacy and alienation also described in "Cut": "I have taken a pill to kill/The
thin/Papery feeling.' Eventually the tulips force her attention into focus and she merges from the
world of whiteness and silence to a not unpleasurable anticipation:

And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes

Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.
The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea
And comes from a country far away as health.

Although Tulips is written in the present tense it has less of the immediacy of some of the later
poems in Ariel because the element of control exhibited in the meditative focus and the
fashioning of thought and feeling into logically connected statements operates as a distancing
device.

From Sylvia Plath: Her Life and Work. Copyright 1973 by Eileen M. Aird.

Margaret Dickie
One of the few poems she saved from this period is "Tulips," written in March, 1961, about some
flowers she had received when she was in the hospital recovering from her appendectomy. Actually
the flowers are only the occasion for a remarkable psychological journey into and out of
anaesthesia, the "numbness" the nurse brings her in "bright needles." The poem traces the stages
by which the hospital patient sinks reluctantly into an anaesthesized "peacefulness," and equally
reluctantly comes out of it, through repeating and reversing the imagery of the first four stanzas
in the imagery of the last four so that the poem moves into and out from a central stanza with
unusual symmetry.
The "too excitable" tulips and their explosions in the first stanza are what the patient awakes to
finally in the last stanza, where she claims that the tulips "should be behind bars like dangerous

29
animals." In the first, she has given her name and day-clothes away; in the last, she reclaims
herself: "I am aware of my heart." In the second stanza, as she relinquishes herself to the nurses
that "pass and pass," she is propped up "Like an eye between two white lids"; coming back to life in
the penultimate stanza, she moves through the same stage where the tulips interrupt the air
"Coming and going" and "concentrate" her attention. The nurses' tending in the third stanza is
matched by the tulips' watching in the seventh. The sensation that her possessions "Sink out of
sight, and the water went over my head" just before she succumbs to the anaesthesia in the
fourth stanza is reversed in the sixth, when, awaking, she feels that the tulips "seem to float,
though they weigh me down," "A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck." In the middle stanza she
attempts, in Emily Dickinson style, to describe the state beyond consciousness: "How free it is,
you have no idea how free-- / The peacefulness is so big it dazes you."
"Tulips" is an unusual poem for Plath because it does move inward toward a silent center and out
again. The fear, shown in many of Plath's early poems, of losing control or the final reluctant
relinquishment to unfathomable powers is absent in this process; where she claims, "I am learning
peacefulness," "I only wanted/ To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty." Even more
unusual than this acceptance of self-loss is the process of reversal, where the mind gradually
takes hold again after the grim recognition that the tulips' "redness talks to my wound, it
corresponds." The common strategy of Plath's poems early and late is for the mind to generate
hyperboles that torment itself; but in "Tulips" this generative faculty has a positive as well as a
negative function. "Tulips" is not a cheerful poem, but it does move from cold to warmth, from
numbness to love, from empty whiteness to vivid redness, in a process manipulated by the
associative imagination. The speaker herself seems surprised by her own gifts and ends the poem
on a tentative note, moving toward the far-away country of health. Because she has so
exaggerated her own emptiness and the tulips' violence and vitality, she must then accept in
herself the attributes she has cast onto the tulips, which return to her as correspondences.
If the supersensitive mind can turn tulips into explosions, it can also reverse the process and turn
dangerous animals into blooming hearts. The control of "Tulips" -- the matching of stanzas, the
correspondences developed between the external object and states of consciousness -- marks a
new stage in Plath's development. Her earlier efforts to train her vision outward, toward the
landscape, and to concentrate on realistic details, as well as her very early apprenticeship in set
forms combine with the Yaddo exercises in spontaneous associative creation to prepare her for
her final poems, of which "Tulips" was the first example. In "Tulips" she develops a new persona.
Though she is neither the public persona of Plath's moor-walker or seaside visitor nor the
intensely private and fragmented identity of her surrealistic meditations, this speaker shares
qualities of both. She is clearly in a hospital, responding to nurses, needles, flowers; but she is
just as clearly engaged in an internal drama, reacting to a wild imaginative activity. The tension
between outer and inner images is maintained (as it had not been in the early poems) by a
tremendous artistic and psychological control.
In this poem Plath reveals what she meant when she said that the manipulative mind must control
its most terrifying experiences. The speaker here, responsive to inner and outer compulsions, is
able to handle her situation. As the inner tensions intensified in the last months of her own life,
Plath was forced to create a persona much more rigid than the speaker of "Tulips." At this point,
however, rigidity is what she scorns.

From Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Copyright 1979 by the Board of Trustees of
the University of Illinois.

Charles Molesworth
In "Tulips," the imagery of forced seeing, of vision itself as the source of the exacerbated
sensibility, assaults us everywhere:

30
 They have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff
Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut.
Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in.

The comic, almost spitting disgust of the assonance in the phrase "stupid pupil" adds to the
allusive parody of Emerson's "'transparent eyeball" from Nature. But this painful, forced seeing is
still, one feels, better than the anesthetized drift that constantly threatens to overtake the
poet. But whatever the reader might feel, Plath seems consciously desirous of either the drift or
the pained fixation, as long as it provides her with an extreme experiential locus.

I watched my teaset, my bureaus of linen, my books

Sink out of sight, and the water went over my head.
I am a nun now, I have never been so pure.

The openness to experience that some regard as one of the hallmarks of American literature
becomes, in Plath's poetry, an ironically balanced pointer that can tip toward either salvation or
annihilation.

I didn't want any flowers, I only wanted

To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.
How free it is, you have no idea how free--
The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,
And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.
It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them
Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.

These alternatives, salvation or annihilation, are here joined in a single image-turned-simile; and
the toneless quality of the lines parodies the transcendent religious structure that lies behind
them, just as "stupid pupil" parodies Emerson. "So big it dazes you" and "you have no idea how
free" both originate in the vocabulary of schoolgirl intensification, and Plath built her language
almost exclusively out of various forms of intensification. Condensation, catachresis, metonymy,
and the verbal strategies of riddles and allusive jokes: all these and more are devices both to
record and to ward off the numbing that results when ordinary consciousness is faced with an
overwhelmingly fragmented objective world, a flood of facticity that simply will not submit to
tenderness or mercy.
One of the standard critical cliches at sprang up around confessional poets was that the language
itself provided their salvation, that the redeeming word could set right what the intractable world
of egos, projects, deceits, and self-destructions had insidiously twisted. This axiom still putatively
left room for individual poets to develop personal styles and remain recognizably confessional.
Oddly enough, however, when thrown back on a radically personal axis, the poetry often ended up
being simultaneously god-haunted and narcotized, as if narcosis and transcendence were mirror
images of each other. In the poetry of Plath and Sexton, we find not only the subject matter but
also the very structure of their imaginations returning again and again to an irreducible choice:
the poet either must become God or cease consciousness altogether. Haunted by the failed myth
of a human, or at least an artistic, perfectability, they turned to a courtship of nihilism.

From The Fierce Embrace: A Study of Contemporary

American Poetry. Copyright 1979 by the Curators of
the University of Missouri.

Barbara Hardy
In "Tulips," there is a slow, reluctant acceptance of the tulips, which means a slow, reluctant
acceptance of a return to life. The poem dramatizes a sick state, making it clear that it is
sickness. The flowers are hateful, as emblems of cruel spring, as presents from the healthy world

31
that wants her back, as suspect, like all presents. They are also emblems of irrational fear:
science is brilliantly misused (as indeed in feeble and deranged states of many kinds) and
phototropism and photosynthesis are used to argue the fear: the flowers really do move toward
the light, do open out, do take up oxygen. The tulips are also inhabitants of the bizarre world of
private irrational fantasy, even beyond the bridge of distorted science: they contrast with the
whiteness of nullity and death, are like a baby, an African cat, are like her wound (a real red
physical wound, stitched so as to heal, not to gape like opened tulips) and, finally, like her heart.
The end of the poem is transforming, opens up the poem. The poem, like the tulips, has really been
opening from the beginning, but all is not plain until the end, as in "Nick." Moreover, in the end the
tulips win, and that is the point. It is a painful victory for life. We move from the verge of
hallucination, which can hear them as noisy, or see them as dangerous animals, to a proper
rationality, which accepts recovery. The poem hinges on this paradox: while most scientific, it is
most deranged; while most surreal, it is most healthy:

And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes

Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.
The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea,
And comes from a country far away as health.

It is the country she as to return to, reluctant though she is: the identification of the breathing,
opened, red, spring-like tulips with her heart makes this plain. She wanted death, certainly, as one
may want it in illness or, moving back from the poem to the other poems and to her real death, as
she wanted it in life. But the poem enacts the movement from the peace and purity of anaesthesia
and feebleness to the calls of life. Once more, the controlled conceits; and the movement from
one state to another creates expansion. The poem opens out to our experience of sickness and
health, to the overwhelming demands of love, which we sometimes have to meet. The symbolism of
present giving and spring flowers makes a bridge from a personal death-longing to common
experience . . . .

From The Survival of Poetry. Copyright 1970 by Barbara

Hardy

Richard Grey
A poem like 'Tulips' is a good illustration of Plaths passion and her craft. Its origins lie in personal
experience: a time when the poet was taken into hospital and was sent flowers as a gift. The
opening four stanzas recover her feelings of peace and release on entering the hospital ward.
'Look how white everything is', she exclaims:

how quiet, how snowed-in,

I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly
As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands,
I am nobody . . .

The verse is nominally free but has a subtle iambic base; the lines, seven to each stanza, move
quietly and mellifluously; and a sense of hidden melody ('learning' / 'lying', 'lying by myself
quietly', 'light lies', 'white walls') transforms apparently casual remarks into memorable speech.
What is more to the point, the almost sacramental terms in which Plath describes herself turn
this experience into a mysterious initiation, a dying away from the world. 'I have given my name
and my day-clothes up to the nurses', Plath says, 'And my history to the anaesthetist and my body
to the surgeons'. Everything that gives her identity, that imprisons her in existence, has been
surrendered; and she sinks into a condition of utter emptiness, openness that is associated at
certain times here with immersion in water -- a return to the foetal state and the matrix of being.
The only initial resistance to this movement comes from a photograph of her husband and children

32
she has by her bedside: reminding her, evidently, of the hell of other people, who cast 'little
smiling hooks' to fish her up out of the sea.
In the next four stanzas, the tulips -- mentioned briefly in the first line and then forgotten --
enter the scene with a vengeance:

The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.
Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe
Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby.
Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.

The flowers arc all that is the opposite of the white, silent world of the hospital, carrying
associations of noise and pressure, 'sudden tongues and . . . colour'. They draw Plath back to life,
the conditioning forces that constitute existence. She feels herself 'watched', identified by 'the
eyes of the tulips': their gaze commits her to a particular status or role. What is more, this
contrary impulse drawing her back into the world and identification 'corresponds' to something in
herself. It comes from within her, just as the earlier impulse towards liberation did. This probably
explains why the conflict of the poem remains unresolved: the ninth and final stanza of the poem
simply and beautifully juxtaposes images of imprisonment and escape, the blood of life and the
salt sea of death. 'And I am aware of my heart', Plath concludes:

it opens and closes

ts bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me,
The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea,
And comes from a country far away as health.

The alternatives here are familiar ones in American writing: either to live in the world and accept
the identity it prescribes, or to flee into a state of absolute freedom. What is less familiar is
that, here as elsewhere, Plath associates these two alternatives, traditionally figured in the
clearing and the wilderness, with the absolute conditions of being and not-being. Fixity, in these
terms, is life; flight is immolation; freedom is the immediate metaphor of the hospital and the
ultimate metamorphosis of death.

From American Poetry of the Twentieth Century . Copyright 1990 by the

Longman Group UK Limited.

Rene R. Curry
Plath steeps the poem "Tulips" in a whiteness depicted as powerful, peaceful, and obliterating: . . .
The wintry whiteness of the white walls presses in on the speaker, both teaching her about
tranquility and enforcing it on her. The pressure results in eradication of herself and obliteration
of the volatility of life. Van Dyne links this annihilation to "the speaker's fears of carnal and
contaminating flesh" (Revising Life 92). As well, Van Dyne suggests that the speaker enjoys the
process of noting the body's drift into "anonymity and irresponsibility" (Revising Life 92). Hayman,
too, claims that Plath luxuriates in the abdication of responsibility in this poem (155).
Significantly, the body that drifts into erasure in "Tulips" is a white body in a white world, a body
confronted with entrapment in or escape from its own powerful signifiers. The speaker in the
poem claims to understand the tulips as signifiers of a complicated sexual world intruding on the
hallowed and clean white world of the hospital. She suggests that she might elude the
seductiveness of the tulips should she become a nun and regain purity.
This reading of the poem works well enough; however, when we read the poem with an eye toward
racial signifiers, the poem situates the plight of many white women who ardently desire an escape
from culpability in white dominance over others. Dyer argues that white women are partially
responsible for white dominance, but that because of their marginal status in relationship to white

33
men, the only way they can maintain their own honor as white women is to do nothing about their
role in domination (206). Thereby, the exquisite and languorous passivity that Plath demonstrates
in "Tulips" marks white women as the culpable incapables that they are in the face of white
dominance. The tulips remind the woman in the poem of other worlds, of other lives, of a
colorfulness outside herself, but the woman cannot acknowledge these worlds and maintain her
white passivity simultaneously. She would have to sacrifice the peacefulness of whiteness.
The tulips signify, by their glorious and bold colors, glaring Otherness. The frustrated speaker of
the poem prescribes an enslavement for them uncannily linked to Africa: "The tulips should be
behind bars like dangerous animals; / They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat. "
Annas rightly notes that the speaker experiences an obligation to choose between the two worlds
the white world and the colorful world (A Disturbance 98)however, I find that the speaker
clearly wishes she did not have the choice. She prefers to imprison the dangerous and colorful
world, so that she may remain passively white.
Perloff reads the white world of the hospital into which the colorful tulips intrude as a "dead, "
"dazed, " and "empty" one. She reads the tulips as the entity that will force the speaker out of
her whiteness (119). But I contend that in the final stanza only the image of the imprisoned tulips
permits the speaker to associate the red of the flowers with the red of her heart. Figuratively
speaking, Otherness may only serve as a catalyst for white inspection once it is safely ensconced
behind bars.

from White Women Writing White: H. D., Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, and
Whiteness. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. Copyright

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)

Eds. A. Poulin, Jr and Michael Waters

A native Boston and a graduate of Smith College, in 1955 Sylvia Plath won a Fulbright Scholarship
to Newnham College, Cambridge. While in England, she met and married the British poet Ted
Hughes. After she taught for a year at Smith (1957-1958), the couple returned to England where
in 1960 she published her first book of poems and subsequently completed her novel, The Bell Jar.
On February 11, 1963, Sylvia Plath committed suicide.

A friend of Anne Sexton and a student of Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath wrote poems that were
intended to sound and to feel brutally personal, almost unbearably painful. Her poems are not
merely about acute mental and emotional suffering; their very structure- the controlled flow of
images, the insistent appositives- draws the reader fully into that suffering. Indeed, her later
poems are so well crafted that some critics have argued, wrongheadedly, that she seemed engaged
in a murderous art- that after writing such frighteningly honest and painfully personal poems,
her suicide was virtually inevitable. As a critical premise, such an argument is utter nonsense, its
absurdity manifestly clear when transferred to another artist and to his or her work. If Plath
virtually had no choice but to commit suicide after writing the poems in Ariel, then what inevitable
choice did Melville have after writing Moby Dick?

What makes Plath interesting as a poet is not primarily her ostensible subject matter and tone;
rather, the success of the poems depends largely on her precision of observation, imagination, and
language- as well as on the mastery of her craftsmanship. For example, the onion simile in Cut
not only accurately describes the swirl of a thumbprint but also serves as the entire poems
controlling metaphor. Moreover, in such poems as Cut and Lady Lazarus, or even in a celebrated
poem such as Daddy, there is also a strong measure of wit and humor- albeit black- often
conveyed through resuscitated clichs that manage to rescue the poems from the pathos.

On more than one occasion, Plath insisted that even the most personal poetry cannot be merely a
cri de coeur; it must be informed by and participate in a greater historical drama. Her own poems

34
participate fully in the vibrant Puritan tradition, not only through her preoccupation with evil
(which is utterly distinct from personal suffering) but also through her metaphysical and
emblematic technique. They also occur against a constant historical drama, especially the
contemporary phenomenon of Nazi Germany out of which she fabricates a modern myth. In short,
the pain, the suffering, the fine edge of madness- all are ultimately crafted and controlled by the
poets reasoned and careful hand flashing a measure of genius.

Excerpted from Contemporary American Poetry, edited by A. Poulin Jr. and Michael Waters.
Copyright 2001 by Houghton Mifflin Company.

"I do not love; I do not love anybody except myself." --quoted in her journals between
1950-52.

Ted Hughes died in October, 1998 (ironically the week

of Sylvia's birthday), just after the publication of his
highly anticipated "Birthday Letters," which is in my
opinion an absolutely beautiful book that works as a
time line of he and Sylvia's relationship. Every poem is
about Sylvia, with I think the exception of 2 or so. For
all of those Ted Hughes haters out there, if this book
doesn't change your mind nothing will. "Birthday
Letters" shows the grief he expressed, where even 30
years after her death he was still writing poems about
her. I do not condone his actions, but at the same time
he didn't kill Sylvia- Sylvia killed Sylvia. She was an
extremely tormented person, most of her emotional
problems beginning long before she had even met Ted
Hughes. W.S. Merwin, a close friend of the Hugheses is
quotedas saying(in "Bitter Fame"): "I came to feel that there was something in Sylvia of a cat
suspended over water, but it was not Ted who had put her up there or kept her there."

Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath met at a party held at St. Botolph's, but both had read each other's
poetry previous to meeting. During their first acquaintance Ted kissed Sylvia on the neck, and she
replied by biting him on the cheek, causing blood to stream down his face. That first meeting
would prove to be a foreshadowing of their tumultuous marriage that would later come. They
actually married only 4 months after they had met, on June 16th 1956.

At first their marriage seemed to be straight out of a fairy tale. In "Letters Home" Sylvia wrote
enthusiastically about how wonderful her relationship was with Ted, which was in no way an
exaggeration of her feelings. Ted was the ideal man that she had been looking for for years, and
had before thought she would never find him. Despite her feelings on being involved with a poet,
she fell head over heels in love with Ted, while he opened her eyes with his interests in animals
and astrology (which I find kind of bizarre because anyone with any knowledge of astrology knows
that Leos and Scorpios are completely incompatible).

Both Sylvia and Ted wanted a "writing" life, each having a rigorous schedule of writing for at least
2 hours every day, reading, and also taking long nature walks. They scoffed at the conventional
life, but in order to acquire money Ted got a job teaching at a boys school, and Sylvia later taught
at Smith. She would also devote her time to typing up Ted's poems, working as his secretary. This
was something she was proud of and enjoyed, confident in his genius and talent.

As much as they both loved writing, it seems that their views on it were completely different.
Lucas Myers, another friend of the Hugheses has said, "Sylvia was determined that it should be

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read. Ted was determined that it should exist." Also, Ted Hughes has been quoted as saying:
"Forgetting has been for me a vital element of survival. Literature is not a supreme value. Life
comes first." (here is a link to this article.)

In the meantime, Ted got his poetry book published ("Hawk in the Rain"), wrote and translated
many plays, and also recorded some of his works for the BBC. Sylvia also got her first book, "The
Colossus and other Poems" started. She would also start working on an early draft of The Bell Jar.

On April 1st, 1960, Sylvia gave birth to Frieda Rebecca

Hughes at her home in England. Their first child's birth
gave Sylvia a new insight on life, and also inspiration for
some new poems and stories. Still, her feelings of
paranoia never fully subsided. She was always afraid
Ted would leave her for a more glamorous and/or
intelligent woman, these insecurities probably stemming
from her father's death as a child. This would lead to a
later outburst caused when Ted was late coming home
from work in London (with the BBC). Sylvia tore up his
books, plays and other works for him to find on the
ground reduced to "fluff." The reason behind her
malicious act was that she was suspicious he was having an affair (not proven that he really was at
the time). Other bizarre behaviors of Sylvia occurred; when it seemed like Ted was being talked
to more than her in the company of friends, Sylvia became furious, demanding his and only his
attention. Lucas Myers said it seemed like Sylvia was trying to "swallow him whole."

It wasn't until 2 years later (and after a miscarriage), on January 17th, that Sylvia gave birth to
Nicholas Farrar Hughes. Their joy was short lived, while Sylvia and Ted's relationship began to
unravel. Ted was seeing Assia Wevill (who had been living in the London flat the Hugheses used to
live in), and Sylvia became understandably jealous. Earlier get-together's with them had seemed
innocent enough, but Sylvia had always suspected them of having an affair, initially noting "a
current of attraction" between the two. Finally, in August of 1962, Sylvia moved out with her
children and filed for divorce.

In the first few months of the divorce, Sylvia stayed cheerfully optimistic, claiming to be writing
the best poems of her life. These poems would later be known as the "Ariel" poems, and would
agreeably be her most haunting and memorable. Unfortunately, her positive outlook wouldn't last
long enough. Within a week of her death she suffered a similar breakdown as she had in her Smith
years. Sylvia ended her life on February 11th, 1963.

Ironically, Sylvia is quoted in "Letter's Home" in a letter to her mother as saying, "I shall be one
of the few women poets in the world who is fully a rejoicing woman, not a bitter or frustrated or
warped man-imitator, which ruins most of them in the end. I am a woman and glad of it, and my
songs will be of fertility and the earth and the people in it through waste, sorrow and death. I
shall be a woman singer, and Ted and I shall make a fine life together..."

The Bell Jar is Sylvia Plath's first novel, written under the name
Victoria Lucas. It also proved to be her last, dying only months
after it was published.

The novel received mixed reviews from critics, which possibly

contributed to her strong feelings of self doubt and inevitably
drove her to her suicide on February 11, 1963.

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Obviously The Bell Jar is about the summer of 1953, the notorious year when Sylvia suffered her
breakdown which resulted in treatments with shock therapy. Nothing better illustrates this than
reading the book, which is almost closer to an autobiography than her journals.

All of the characters were based on characters that Sylvia loved, Buddy being based on an old
boyfriend, Dick Norton. She mentions a bit about him in this entry in her journal, which also
sounds like an early outline of The Bell Jar, saying: "A possible theme: virgin girl brought up in
idealism expects virginity from boy her family raves about as pure. He is going to be a doctor, a
pillar of society; he is already swinging toward conventionalism. Takes her through lectures on
sickle-cell anemia, moon-faces babies in jars, cadavers, baby born. She doesn't flinch. What she
flinches at is his affair with a waitress. She hates him for it. Jealous. Sees no reason for being a
virgin herself. What's the point in being a virgin? Argument with him: humor. She won't marry him.
What are her motives? He is a hypocrite."

with Esther and Buddy's relationship,

All of those elements turn up in The Bell Jar
as do the cadavers, the affair with the waitress, and everything else.

The subject matter is extremely serious, but to me

some parts of it were humorous, and it happens to be
one of the funniest books I've ever read. The clever
blend of sarcasm throughout keeps things on it's toes,
nothing is too dreary and depressing (even for Sylvia).
I remember reading it during study hall and almost
laughing out loud, but having to contain myself so no
one would see me laughing while reading such a
"depressing" book. Two parts in particular were when
she keeps mistaking the doctor's name, calling him,
"Dr. Pancreas," and funnier yet, "Dr. Syphilis." (Okay I
have a weird sense of humor!) I think my very most
favorite part though, is when she is conversing with a
woman in the hospital, and when Esther is asked why
she's there, she turns around with her bruised eye and
simply replies: "I tried to kill myself." Morbid, yes.
Was it intended to be funny? Of course. Sylvia's
unique sense of humor definitely shows during the
funnier scenes. I believe that she intended it to be
this way, and in "Letters Home," she commented about
how "hellishly funny" her writing had become.

Sylvia's prose writing is extremely symbolic, and often tangles in and out of metaphors. This is
clearly evident in The Bell Jar, and even more so in her journals. Her imagery is fairly strong,
relying on the metaphors for feeling and emotion instead of straight out saying what the
character is experiencing. I don't think the reactions to this book would be as strong if it had
been written any other way.

The ending is particularly sad, seeing how much hope she felt, but knowing the bitter reality of
how she ended up. Hopefully through her writing we can all try to understand her for the gifted
writer and wonderful mother that she was, not necessarily the mad neurotic woman that she is
often mistaken to be. I don't think she was that at all. She was a writer attempting to understand
life through her work, who became an icon and inspiration of the modern literary world. In
essence, that's what she always wanted.

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If you'd like to see more information about The Bell Jar, I would highly suggest going here: The
Bell Jar, or at this site: Peter Steinberg's Sylvia Plath Site.

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