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Sylvia is still happily regaling Alvarez with her latest poetic efforts, and this includes perhaps her most famous poem, “Lady Lazarus”. What makes this happy occasion and this poem especially significant is that she had only recently made another serious suicide attempt, driving her car off the road, as she now relates to Alvarez. This was her second or possibly her third such attempt, and “Lady Lazarus” is particularly about this penchant of hers to play thus with death.
_ _ _
In life, as in the poem, there was neither hysteria in her voice, nor any appeal for sympathy. She talked about suicide in much the same tone as she talked about any other risky, testing activity: urgently, even fiercely, but altogether without self-pity. She seemed to view death as a physical challenge she had, once again, overcome. It was an experience of much the same quality as riding Ariel or mastering a bolting horse - which she had done as a Cambridge undergraduate - or careering down a dangerous snow slope without properly knowing how to ski - an incident also from life, which is one of the best things in The Bell Jar. Suicide, in short, was not a swoon into death, an attempt “to cease upon the midnight with no pain”; it was something to be felt in the nerve ends and fought against, an initiation rite qualifying her for a life of her own.
-- A. Alvarez, “The Savage God”
_ _ _
From my old classroom discussions, I got the idea that Sylvia’s suicide attempts were less a physical challenge than a test of destiny, that is, when she would get abysmally depressed and start to wonder if life were worth living, she would make a significant attempt on her life to see if she were meant to live, that her attempts would not be truly conclusive, such as a gun to the head or a leap from a tall building, but neither was it a cry for help, but more like a roll of the dice. If she survived, then she enjoyed a certain emotional uplift in the belief that it was not her time yet, like she enjoyed a kind of certainty, a clearer purpose.
_ _ _
I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it——
A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot
A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine
Jew linen.
Peel off the napkin
O my enemy.
Do I terrify?——
The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.
Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me
And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.
This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.
What a million filaments.
The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see
Them unwrap me hand and foot——
The big strip tease.
Gentlemen, ladies
These are my hands
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,
Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.
The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut
As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.
Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I’ve a call.
It’s easy enough to do it in a cell.
It’s easy enough to do it and stay put.
It’s the theatrical
Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:
‘A miracle!’
That knocks me out.
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.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.
I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby
That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.
Ash, ash—
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there——
A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.
Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.
Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.
-- "Lady Lazarus" by Sylvia Plath
_ _ _
One more note. In her poem “Lady Lazarus”, Sylvia had an additional line, so as to read:
_ _ _
“Why Japanese?” I niggled away at her. Do you just need the rhyme? Or are you just trying to hitch an easy lift by dragging in the atomic victims? If you're going to use this kind of violent material, you've got to play it cool..." She argued back sharply, but later, when the poem was finally published after her death, the line had gone. And that, I think, is a pity: she did need the rhyme; the tone is quite controlled enough to support the apparently not quite relevant allusion; and I was overreacting to the initial brutality of the verse without understanding its weird elegance.
-- A. Alvarez, "The Savage God"
_ _ _
Now when I read the poem, I cannot just forget about the 'Japanese' line, so that I effectively read it both wise, and I am not certain which is better. I do like the added rhyme, and it adds a certain dark whimsy to the poem, but I don't know if the final, more restrained version is hurt by the absence of the line.
I don't think she is Jewish, and if I'm right, I don't see why it would hurt to bring the bombed Japanese into the picture; in fact, without it, one has to fight off the notion that she is Jewish and therefore has some personal right to the claiming of Nazi atrocities. In any case, I imagine I will read the poem both ways from now on, with the debate remaining ongoing in my mind.
_ _ _
And let's not lose sight of the poignant fact that this poem is published posthumously. You cannot count on miralces again and again. Though, I guess the show goes on, and we do continue to buy the wreckage of the life of this pure gold baby.
What she reads here is even more slightly different than the final version that comes to us, and I am more inclined to think this version she reads is the better one.
_ _ _
In life, as in the poem, there was neither hysteria in her voice, nor any appeal for sympathy. She talked about suicide in much the same tone as she talked about any other risky, testing activity: urgently, even fiercely, but altogether without self-pity. She seemed to view death as a physical challenge she had, once again, overcome. It was an experience of much the same quality as riding Ariel or mastering a bolting horse - which she had done as a Cambridge undergraduate - or careering down a dangerous snow slope without properly knowing how to ski - an incident also from life, which is one of the best things in The Bell Jar. Suicide, in short, was not a swoon into death, an attempt “to cease upon the midnight with no pain”; it was something to be felt in the nerve ends and fought against, an initiation rite qualifying her for a life of her own.
-- A. Alvarez, “The Savage God”
_ _ _
From my old classroom discussions, I got the idea that Sylvia’s suicide attempts were less a physical challenge than a test of destiny, that is, when she would get abysmally depressed and start to wonder if life were worth living, she would make a significant attempt on her life to see if she were meant to live, that her attempts would not be truly conclusive, such as a gun to the head or a leap from a tall building, but neither was it a cry for help, but more like a roll of the dice. If she survived, then she enjoyed a certain emotional uplift in the belief that it was not her time yet, like she enjoyed a kind of certainty, a clearer purpose.
_ _ _
I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it——
A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot
A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine
Jew linen.
Peel off the napkin
O my enemy.
Do I terrify?——
The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.
Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me
And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.
This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.
What a million filaments.
The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see
Them unwrap me hand and foot——
The big strip tease.
Gentlemen, ladies
These are my hands
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,
Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.
The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut
As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.
Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I’ve a call.
It’s easy enough to do it in a cell.
It’s easy enough to do it and stay put.
It’s the theatrical
Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:
‘A miracle!’
That knocks me out.
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.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.
I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby
That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.
Ash, ash—
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there——
A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.
Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.
Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.
-- "Lady Lazarus" by Sylvia Plath
_ _ _
One more note. In her poem “Lady Lazarus”, Sylvia had an additional line, so as to read:
Gentlemen, ladiesAlvarez relates what happened to that last line.
These are my hands
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,
I may be Japanese.
_ _ _
“Why Japanese?” I niggled away at her. Do you just need the rhyme? Or are you just trying to hitch an easy lift by dragging in the atomic victims? If you're going to use this kind of violent material, you've got to play it cool..." She argued back sharply, but later, when the poem was finally published after her death, the line had gone. And that, I think, is a pity: she did need the rhyme; the tone is quite controlled enough to support the apparently not quite relevant allusion; and I was overreacting to the initial brutality of the verse without understanding its weird elegance.
-- A. Alvarez, "The Savage God"
_ _ _
Now when I read the poem, I cannot just forget about the 'Japanese' line, so that I effectively read it both wise, and I am not certain which is better. I do like the added rhyme, and it adds a certain dark whimsy to the poem, but I don't know if the final, more restrained version is hurt by the absence of the line.
I don't think she is Jewish, and if I'm right, I don't see why it would hurt to bring the bombed Japanese into the picture; in fact, without it, one has to fight off the notion that she is Jewish and therefore has some personal right to the claiming of Nazi atrocities. In any case, I imagine I will read the poem both ways from now on, with the debate remaining ongoing in my mind.
_ _ _
And let's not lose sight of the poignant fact that this poem is published posthumously. You cannot count on miralces again and again. Though, I guess the show goes on, and we do continue to buy the wreckage of the life of this pure gold baby.
What she reads here is even more slightly different than the final version that comes to us, and I am more inclined to think this version she reads is the better one.
