Hannalee Billings

July 20, 2014

English 102
Love is a Battlefield

Lady Lazarus and Daddy are two famous poems by Sylvia Plath. Lady Lazarus and
Daddy were both written in 1962, one year before Plaths death. Both poems depict feelings and
thoughts Plath felt in the last year of her life and her comparisons of her as a metaphorical victim
of the holocaust. Lady Lazarus depicts death, violence and suffering leading the reader to
understand and connect with Plaths sarcasm and extreme dismal tone. Daddy focuses more on
gender, mortality, the supernatural, freedom and confinement, and language and communication.
One can truly feel Plaths bitterness and morbidity to life in general. These poems are important
because they reflect her life of turmoil and depression.
Sylvia Plath was born in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts on October 27th 1932. She was the
eldest daughter of Aurelia Schober Plath and Otto Plath. Her Father died in 1940 so her mother
transitioned from a housewife and took a teaching position at the University of Boston. Plaths
first publication of a poem was at age 8. Plath got a scholarship at Smith College where she
majored in English. In 1953 Sylvia had her first break down and first suicide attempt. This did
not hold her back and she graduated college in 1955. Soon after she married Ted Hughes in 1956
but the marriage was short-lived as they soon separated in 1962. Sylvias life took a turn for the
worst as she fell deeper and deeper into a clinical depression and committed suicide in 1963
(Satterfield, J).
Lady Lazarus begins with a clever lyrical rhyme scheme telling us that she has done
something repeatedly every ten years. From reading Plaths biography the reader tends to wonder
if this something is her repeated suicide attempts, meaning that Lady Lazarus is a fictional
depiction of herself. Later on in the poem she reiterates that this is number three. What a trash
to annihilate each decade. Plath herself was 30 years old when she committed suicide (Allen,

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Austin.). She lets us know that the second time I meant to last it out and not come back at all.
Meaning that the suicide attempt she made at twenty was supposed to be successful, but alas it
was not. Throughout the poem Sylvia continues to embody this Lady Lazarus but yet continues
to use the first person instead of saying Lady Lazarus.
Its important to note that Lady Lazarus is written in tercets, 3-line stanzas. When one
reads this poem out loud the words flow quickly and forcefully it almost sounds like a spitting or
biting of words. Rhyming words that are used such as hell, or call, or cell makes the poem sound
much like chant one might repeat over and over again. She uses these techniques to show to the
literal feeling of despair in not only her choice of words but also in how she flowed them
together.
Plath begins declaring that she will not live in this black shoe shes lived in the poem
Daddy. We soon infer that she is comparing her father to a shoe that she has been living in
unhappily. In the following stanza she declares that she must kill her father and that he has died
before she has had time. Plaths father died when she was 8 (Siskel, Callie). Plath must have felt
a great loss at the death of her father at such a young age and inevitably feels trapped and scared.
Next, she states that he is in a body bag that is marble heavy, visually illustrating the stiffness of
a corpse. But then she sends us into a world wind claiming that the body is a bag full of God.
Plath is trying to tell us how controlling her fathers death was for her, a major life event that she
could never move on from, almost as powerful as a God.
It is important to note the size of the character expressed in the poem Daddy. She
describes herself as small and her father as immensely larger. She does this in the first few lines
by comparing the speakers father to a shoe in which she lives. Plath does not really live in a
shoe but uses the shoe to express how she feels trapped by the memories of her father. Later on

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English 102
she makes the father seems huge by using a statue to describe her father, Ghastly statue with
one gray toe big as a Frisco seal and a head in the freakish Atlantic. He is not any ordinary
statue either; he is about the size of the entire United States.
What is so moving about Plaths poems are the fact that we know that her father has died
at a young age but we are never told why she feels so malevolent towards him instead of wishing
he was here with her. Daddy illustrates an example of Plaths thinking: Black and White. She sees
herself as a victim and her father as her enemy and herself as the oppressed, there is never any
grey in between. This resonates as an immature form of though processing, as at the age of 8 she
couldnt have possibly known much about her father. Yet again, though, we do not know if he
had abused her or her mother to make Plath feel this way.
Plath includes a lot of suffering and violence into her poems. Suffering is shown in Lady
Lazarus, lines 25-29 reads what a million filaments the peanut-crunching crowd shoves in to see
them unwrap me hand and food- the big strip tease. Her suffering here is a portrayal of herself
as a circus attraction that has no control as the crowd picks her apart and embarrasses her.
Violence is also exhibited in lines 57-64 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. Lady Lazarus is telling us
that the crowed has to pay to see her somewhat like a stripper. She feels trapped and that
everyone around her wants a literal piece of her, her hair and even her blood.
Sylvia makes several references of the holocaust in both poems. Her father was in fact
born in Germany but there are no records of him ever being in the holocaust or being a part of
the German Nazi party. Plath herself was young child during WWII and was living in the USA.
Even though she was not present in the holocaust she is able to use her talent of vivid

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imagination to offer an insight into her personal life and the life of those involved in the
holocaust.
In the poem Daddy Plath describes her father as a Nazi and herself as a victimized Jew.
He is portrayed like a Nazi then as the Devil and finally as a vampire sucking her blood. Plath
vividly describes her father as dead and calling to her from the grave and asking to join him. An
immense power struggle, the victim finally breaks free and declares the black telephones off at
the root,/ the voices just cant worm through, creating imagery of a telephone and grave
(McCann, J). Again, Plath is expressing her constant reminder of the death of her father and
how because he was dead she could not reach him and if she were to die she could talk to him.
Sylvia overcoming this is stated in her final lines declaring daddy, daddy, you bastard, Im
through. Unfortunately, these words contradict her suicide a few months later.
Describing her father as a part of the supernatural is something we have not seen Sylvia
do before. She is directly addressing someone who is dead and even referring to him as a
vampire, a mystical being. Even when Plath attempts to die and be with her father she says that
some sort of force pulled her out of her sack, inferring to her misery, and they stuck me together
with glue. Unless when the doctors attempted to save her life by using a type of glue to close
her wounds, Plath is referring to the fact that she is very heartbroken and literally feels like she is
a part of two pieces in desperate need of being put back together. More so, in lines 38-39 Plath
illustrates with my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck and my taroc pack and my taroc pack.
She is referring to how she is of gipsy decent, a group of traveling people, who in history have
been seen as using several forms of witchcraft. Taroc cards are actually a 14th century card game
developed in Italy, including tarot cards, which are used as trumps. Tarot cards are primarily
used to answer questions about ones future and are usually used by gipsys.

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English 102
Lady Lazarus is very bitter and menacing and constantly repeats that Herr Doktor and
Herr Enemy are oppressing her and the use of herr reinforces the stereotype of Germanic male
authority (Heaton, D. M). Plath has entranced us into her vivid imagination of Lady Lazarus
being a prisoner inside a concentration camp being plucked of her gold teeth. Inferring from
Plaths suicide one might believe that this concentration camp and death is coming from depths
of her mind as Plath herself may feel trapped and alone inside her own mind. The following lines
of the poem, the Nazis have burned her in a crematorium, declaring how dying is an art. Just as
the reader thinks Lady Lazarus is all but a pile of ash she rises from the depths and warns the
men of the world that she consumes men as fire does oxygen (Heaton, D. M). The hatred
expressed towards the male gender seems to come from Plaths unsuccessful marriage and death
of her father, the men her life left her and now she is all alone and unable to find true happiness.
Both poems also resonate feministic undertones. In Daddy, lines 48, Plath writes,
sarcastically that Every woman adores a fascist. Ironically playing into the assumption that the
male gender knows what every woman wants. Line 54-56 state not any less the black man
who bit my pretty red heart in two. Again declaring the victimization of women and portrays
men as evil and black and women as pretty and red. Lady Lazarus does not explicitly declare
feminism as does Daddy but in turn reminds us of the tragedy left behind when fathers leave
their daughters or wives behind.
It is interesting how, although she resents her father for leaving her and her mother
behind in his death, she chooses to marry a man similar in characteristics as her father. Her
constant power struggle between herself, her father's control, and her triumph of freedom leads
the reader to believe that she has moved on and can finally be at peace yet she surprisingly
marries the same type of man. Even if the marriage was not successful, as during the time the

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English 102
poem was written the media hints towards rumors of Hughes's infidelity, her father still haunted
her even after his death. One can only wonder if the hatred towards her father was because of his
infidelity to her mother as Hughes was unfaithful to her.
Sylvia expresses a lot of her frustrations with the male gender and even some frustration
towards herself. She does not wish to be as sad as she is but yet she is and she is resentful and
she blames her father for leaving her and even goes as far as to claim he is the reason she wants
to die so that she can see him. Poetry was definitely an ailment for Plath but forlorn she was
found dead with her head in an oven, carbon monoxide poisoning, from an apparent suicide.

Hannalee Billings
July 20, 2014
English 102
Bibliography
Allen, Austin. "Lady Lazarus." Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, n.d. Web. 20 July 2014.
The poetry foundation is an organization that offers a wide variety of poems online for
public use. They also provide related content about the poem such as the author, time
period, subjects, and poetic terms. This foundation was founded in Chicago Illinois in
2003 to promote poetry to a wider culture. Austin Allen is a poet and analyist for Poetry
Genuis whom which works directly with the Poetry Foundation. Used in this paper was
the poem offered on the website Lady Lazarus written by Sylvia Plath.
Leondopoulos, J. (2002). Daddy. Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition, 1-3.
Jordan Lendopoulos is a film editor and English professor at the City College Of New
York. Masterplots II: Poetry is a book written by several English analysts examining
famous poetry works, including Sylvia Plath. Leondopoulos was one of many affiliated
with creating the book. Plaths poem Daddy was analyzed in depth and included a
viewpoint on her biography in connection to her poem.
McCann, J. (2006). Daddy. MagillS Survey Of American Literature, Revised Edition, 1
Janet McCann is one of the authors to Magills Survey of American Literature, which
includes several analyses of poems by famous poems including Emily Dickinson and
Edgar Allen Poe. McCann is a well published author and received her Ph.D at the
University of Pittsburgh in 1973 and is currently a professor at Texas A&M University.
This excerpt analyses the works of Sylvia Plaths Daddy and the meaning and
explanation behind the poem.
Satterfield, J. (2011). Biography of Sylvia Plath. Critical Insights: The Bell Jar, 22-30.
Jane Satterfield is the author of the book Critical Insights: The Bell Jar which analyzes
the mentioned work of Sylvia Plath. Within this book Satterfield includes a brief but
insightful biography of Plath. Satterfield is a well published British-American poet and
the recipient of the National Endowment of the Arts Literature Fellowship of Poetry. Her
book provided information regarding Plaths upbringing and adult life.
Siskel, Callie. "Daddy." Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, n.d. Web. 20 July 2014.
The poetry foundation is an organization that offers a wide variety of poems online for
public use. They also provide related content about the poem such as the author, time
period, subjects, and poetic terms. This foundation was founded in Chicago Illinois in
2003 to promote poetry to a wider culture. Callie Siskel is a creative writing professor at
John Hopkins University and a writer of poetry and is affiliated with the Poetry
Foundation. Used in this paper was the poem offered on the website Daddy written by
Sylvia Plath.