lady_lazarus epitome of incomprehensibility This is one of my favourite poems, and I can explain. For one, I'm writing some slightly_autobiographical Bible fanfiction right now, so apparently this is a genre I like. Even if Sylvia Plath lived and died before "fanfiction" became a word (or two, depending how you spell it). For two, the flow. The balance of images, everything relating together in some fashion. A phoenix. Resurrection. Rebellion. For three, the ending, which seems to counterbalance real-life tragedy - the author ending her life so young. At least in the poem, she stands triumphant, defiant. Transmuted into air and fire, mythical. (Who's to know that her soul isn't like that? ...Not that I was Plath in a past life. Someone less silly might have been. Maybe a white-throated sparrow.) I also want to add (in belated answer to a years-ago conversation) that I'm not against Plath making references to Nazi Germany. It's just that I don't think she did it very well in "Daddy" - to me, that poem comes across too much like "my problems are JUST LIKE this larger historical tragedy." It's different in "Lady Lazarus." The image of the observers as Nazis (for instance) serves to connect the "freak show" theme with different points in history, so the image reads more like an insight on how mental or physical illness is too often treated like a weakness to exploit, to experiment on, to destroy. It's not like "Daddy," which seems to equate a single speaker's problems with the Holocaust, which (to me) comes across as all out of proportion. (But then my first version of The_Nostratic_Hypothesis was a little bit like this. Just with the Bible again and with different daddy issues - me wanting answers that a parent can't provide.) 250816 ... ovenbird I really love this poem too! And I hadn't read it in quite some time, so thank you for the reminder. It's a poem that has so much to say about the spectacle of suffering--the way it is consumed as entertainment by a hungry public. And while it reverberates with notions of suicide, I think it also grapples with the way life contains a variety of small deaths that might be attached to grief or depression or major life transitions. We die to our past selves over and over and have to rebuild from the ashes. It's interesting to me that the poem is called Lady Lazarus but it ends on an image of the phoenix rising (with red fiery hair) from the ashes. The Lazarus story is passive and his rising is accredited to an outside force (Jesus performing a miracle and calling Lazarus out of death). The Phoenix is self determined. It contains the possibility of its own resurrection as a feature of its core self. I think there's something in there about autonomy. I would have to think about it a little more! 250817 what's it to you? who go blather from