Lady Lazarus

Throughout “Lady Lazarus,” the speaker describes her experiences with death and resurrection with a tone of cynical disdain. The title is a reference to the New Testament story of Lazarus, a dead man on whom Jesus performed a miracle by bringing him back to life. The Lady Lazarus of the title is the speaker of the poem, and she does not experience neither relief nor joy at being repeatedly brought back to life. Instead, the speaker describes dying as a painful and relentless endeavor that she must repeat nine times.

The poem opens with the speaker’s most recent death: “I have done it again” (Line 1). The plain language of the first line of the poem lends a sense of routine, suggesting that the speaker has experienced death before, most likely by her own hand. The speaker declares that death happens at regular intervals throughout her life, which makes her a kind of “walking miracle” (Line 4), which is another allusion to the Bible story of Lazarus.

That the speaker is able to survive death is a remarkable feat, but the speaker experiences the miracle as highly taxing and burdensome. She uses imagery related to the Holocaust to emphasize her despair: “my skin / bright as a Nazi lampshade” (Lines 4-5). The speaker’s comparison of her fragmented self to household objects emphasizes both her emotional fragility and her subjugation as a woman living with the expectations of patriarchal society; she compares her skin to a lampshade, her right foot to a paperweight in Lines 6-7 and her face to a piece of linen cloth in Lines 8-9.

The speaker views male authority figures, whom she addresses directly at several points in the poem, as enemies who facilitate and enjoy the spectacle of her suffering. She describes her suffering as a form of entertainment for men who look on her with amusement and excitement. Their acts of voyeurism inspire in the speaker a sense of objectification and fragmentation, which is enhanced by the brevity of each three-line stanza and the staccato rhythm of the poet’s use of free verse. 

When the speaker reflects on her past encounters with death, she describes a kind of prophecy about her life and her destiny to die over and over again. The repetitive nature of her deaths diminishes her sense of self-worth because they feel like a tiresome performance for a voyeuristic crowd of men who enjoy the spectacle of a woman suffering: “The peanut-crunching crowd / Shoves in to see” (Line 26-27). These public viewings invade the speaker’s inner world, and she compares it to being stripped naked without her consent. Once again she breaks her body down into parts, hands, knees, skin, and bone (Lines 31-33), emphasizing her feelings of objectification and dehumanization by men in her life.

When the speaker remembers the first time she died, at the young age of ten, she recalls that it was an accident, and her next encounter with death was no accident: “The second time I meant/ To last it out and not come back at all” (Lines 37-38). She describes this second death as peaceful, comparing herself to a seashell rocked to sleep by the gentle tides of the sea. The image of the worms that devour her rotting body is grotesque, but the speaker compares the worms to “pearls” (Line 42). She compares the beauty of dying to an act of the living, a paradox that suggests that the speaker can only truly be alive and witness the beauty of life in the midst of death.

In Line 44, the speaker equates dying with art, something that she can  romanticize and hone as her craft. Her resolute confidence in the art of dying is jarring, as it contains a paradox: to be good at something, even if the talent involves death, suggests being alive. Yet, the speaker feels most alive when she is closest to death and suffering: “I do it so it feels like hell./ I do it so it feels real./ I guess you could say I’ve a call.” (Lines 46-48).

Towards the end of the poem, the speaker directs her speech towards the men who have been authority figures in her life. She proclaims that if she, alive or dead, is art, then she will become the greatest piece of art they ever made: “I am your opus” (Line 67). The speaker credits these men with the creation of her dead self, and so she takes deep satisfaction when the work of art catches fire, despite the fact that she herself is destroyed by the act. The poem ends triumphantly, as the speaker asserts that her death matters little when she can rise again, take her revenge, and “eat men like air” (Line 84).