Suicide In Lazarus By Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath is an American poet from the 50s and early 60s. Her work is very well known all over the world and she is loved by fans and critics alike. Plath was born in 1932. In her early life, her German immigrant father was always sick but would not seek treatment. Eventually, he was diagnosed with diabetes but it was too late. He died of complications during an amputation of his foot. As a Unitarian Christian, Plath lost faith after her father’s death and frequently questioned her religion. When she became a young adult, Plath started experiencing signs of depression and would attempt to commit suicide in many different, elaborate ways. It seemed that she would have one big suicide attempt every decade, and when she was just thirty years …show more content…
Ariel was published in 1965, two years after Plath’s suicide. The volume was a profound critical success. It was considered a major literary event, and made Plath known as a poetic genius. The volume detailed the tragic nature of her life. This aspect of Plath’s work is considered “autobiographical, rather than imaginative” ("Sylvia Plath: Poems"). These final poems of her life seemed to allow Plath to vent her imagination and struggles leading to her suicide. In “Lazy Lazarus,” Plath is writing about her tortured life and attempts at suicide. She talks about concentration camps and Jews in the holocaust. She also discusses revealing her true identity and the world not accepting her. She says they will stare at her like a side show act, so she might as well just kill …show more content…
First, Plath makes herself seem like a normal, accepted thirty year old woman: “And I a smiling woman./I am only thirty.” The number thirty is significant because it is the age that Plath finally succeeded at killing herself. Next, Plath compares herself to a cat. “And like the cat I have nine times to die.” Her depressed view of the world causes the hopeful concept of having nine lives like a cat into an awful fact that a cat must suffer death nine times, instead of just dying. She compares herself to the cat because she keeps failing at her suicide attempts. She lives every time as if she is a cat with nine lives, but she just wants to die already. She goes on to talk about how her third attempt failed as well: “This is Number Three./What a trash/To annihilate each decade.” She looks at herself as a failure and her attempts as trash and hopes that her successful suicide attempt will not only bring her happiness, but also erase the embarrassment and guilt from her previous attempts