What is “Lady Lazarus” by Sylvia Plath about?
mrs-campbell Teacher High School – 11th Grade This poem has a theme of resurrection, of rising from the dead, and of the spectacle that such an occurrence is in one’s life and the life of those who witness such an event. Whether this “resurrection” is literal or figurative, Plath discusses how she the character in the poem has done it 3 times in her life, and how she manages to do it every decade (she mentions that she is “only thirty” in her poem). She writes the poem as a sort of female Lazarus (Lazarus was a man who Christ raised from the dead in the Bible), and in the poem describes the physical, very real ugliness of the corpse coming back to life. She mentions “worms,” “eyepits,” and “sour breath” as part of the dead body, and mentions a rather circus-like atmosphere as people come to gawk and gaze at the creepy and surreal phenomenon. She also has a theme of potential female anger against male domination; she describes Germanesque dominating males who want to profit from her, bu
