I’ve read The Bell Jar, https://richardswsmith.wordpress.com/2018/09/03/sylvia-plaths-the-bell-jar-to-the-person-in-the-bell-jar-blank-and-stopped-as-a-dead-baby-the-world-itself-is-the-bad-dream/  and I admire the poetry of Silvia Plath (1932-63). But I haven’t read all of Ariel, and a series of radio programmes has introduced me to poems that I didn’t know, including Lady Lazarus. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002zghg

The radio series concentrates on her writing. Those who made the series worry that Plath’s short and dramatic life, her passionate but ultimately disastrous marriage, her mental illness, and her theatrical suicide overshadow her poetry. They worry too that Plath is read mainly by girls (not even women) and is dismissed as “confessional.” Then there are worries about the crude antisemitism of her journals and her use, as in this poem, of imagery from the Holocaust. The antisemitism cannot be excused, although it was, of course, common at the time, but the series pointed out that the Holocaust was very present when she was writing her poems and that new horrors were being discovered. And why shouldn’t a poet use such imagery?

The poem is so powerful, so clear in many ways (especially if you have read The Bell Jar and know of Plath’s life), so precise, so packed with evocative imagery, and so spare in its words that I can hardly bring myself to write anything about it. But the words that grabbed me as I listened to the radio series were the very last: “Out of the ash/I rise with my red hair/And I eat men like air.” They are threatening, aggressive words. She fights back against the patriarchy. But what does it mean to “eat men like air?” You don’t eat air, you breathe it. Has she written air for no better reason that it rhymes with hair, or does she mean that she can suck in men as she sucks in air? She extracts the oxygen and expels that carbon dioxide.

Lady Lazarus by Silvia Plath

I have done it again.   

One year in every ten   

I manage it——

A sort of walking miracle, my skin   

Bright as a Nazi lampshade,   

My right foot

A paperweight,

My face a featureless, fine   

Jew linen.

Peel off the napkin   

O my enemy.   

Do I terrify?——

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?   

The sour breath

Will vanish in a day.

Soon, soon the flesh

The grave cave ate will be   

At home on me

And I a smiling woman.   

I am only thirty.

And like the cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three.   

What a trash

To annihilate each decade.

What a million filaments.   

The peanut-crunching crowd   

Shoves in to see

Them unwrap me hand and foot——

The big strip tease.   

Gentlemen, ladies

These are my hands   

My knees.

I may be skin and bone,

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.   

The first time it happened I was ten.   

It was an accident.

The second time I meant

To last it out and not come back at all.   

I rocked shut

As a seashell.

They had to call and call

And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

Dying

Is an art, like everything else.   

I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.   

I do it so it feels real.

I guess you could say I’ve a call.

It’s easy enough to do it in a cell.

It’s easy enough to do it and stay put.   

It’s the theatrical

Comeback in broad day

To the same place, the same face, the same brute   

Amused shout:‘A miracle!’

That knocks me out.   

There is a charge

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge   

For the hearing of my heart——

It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge   

For a word or a touch   

Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.   

So, so, Herr Doktor.   

So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus,

I am your valuable,   

The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek.   

I turn and burn.

Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

Ash, ash—

You poke and stir.

Flesh, bone, there is nothing there——

A cake of soap,   

A wedding ring,   

A gold filling.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer   

Beware

Beware.

Out of the ash

I rise with my red hair   

And I eat men like air.