Lady Lazarus

     Clearly the author here is very depressed. She seems to want her life over with, yet she says, “like the cat I have nine times to die.” It’s as if attempting to kill herself has become some crazy habit or obsession.  She even has a time table for it: “One year in every ten”. I guess the more appropriate thing to say would be that resurrecting herself is the obsession since she refers to herself as “Lady Lazarus”. The author made parallels from her story and the event in the Bible when Jesus brought Lazarus back from the dead. She talks about a “grave cave”. This could be referring to a tomb, like what Lazarus might have been put in after he died. Plath also talks about being stripped of filaments: “Them unwrap me hand and foot-“. Lazarus was most likely wrapped in some kind of cloth before put in the tomb. Closer to the end of the poem, she obsesses over her resurrection some more by relating herself to a phoenix: “I turn and burn…Ash, ash-…Out of the ash/I rise with my red hair. A phoenix is a mythical creature that sets fire when it’s time to die and later is reborn from the ashes.  Perhaps she sees her suicide attempts as a way to be “reborn".