Comment 23 of 63, added on April 17th, 2006 at 9:31 AM.

I thought that the reference to Lazarus was biblical - Lazarus, the brother
of Martha and Mary, who was brought back from the dead by Jesus. Comments?

S G from India

Comment 21 of 63, added on February 12th, 2006 at 9:06 AM.

this poem is by far one of my favorites i was able to analyze this very
easily and even connect with it on a deep level. i love poems about suicide
and depression for a couple of reasons one i can relate to them and 2 i
like poems that are riddled with emotion. i feel the deeper the more pain
or compassion the better it connects with the reader on many levels. i love
this poem if only the great sylvia plath was here today to see how far her
work has come

tarya from United States

Comment 19 of 63, added on December 12th, 2005 at 5:29 AM.

I usually have a very hard time analyzing poetry, but Plath's
confessionalist works are clear to me. As one of the previous commentors
noted, only she knows exactly what she is saying, but we can connect with
her meanings through the emotions she is not afraid to show in this poem.
She believed that you should take the mundane, everyday sorrow and connect
it with something bigger. That is why this poem alludes to the Nazis and
the Jews. She is incorportating her emotionnal struggle and her battle
with manic depression into the sorrows of the world. She does this so that
even those of us who have not posted hours in a mental treatment facility
can understand the emotions tied to her suffering. I don't think she
equates herself with the Jews and their level of suffering. She was more
intelligent and insightful than that. She just wants to convey human
emotion at every level of the spectrum so that even the "peanut crunching
crowd", who are portrayed (quite accurately) as unfeeling, or unable to
make the connections between different forms of human suffering and
persecution. Another thing she is doing in this poem is contrasting her
exterior with her interior. She is powerful on the outside, like the Nazi
lampshade, but she is frail on the inside. Her death is her control over
the situation; her only control. She was separated with two small
children, low on money, and ill. It was all she knew to do at that point.
But what kept happening is that she kept surviving, and that was simply the
bane of her existence. She was tired of waking up to the "same place, the
same face, the same brute..." So finally, she triumphed. She has arisen
through her work, and as one of the other commentors said, she lives on
through her poetry.

Leah from Germany

Comment 17 of 63, added on November 29th, 2005 at 3:36 AM.

what does anyone think about the pronoun "I" as a tool in this poem? i
think it works better than other Plath poems like Moon and the yew tree
because of the "I" but the way she makes her self sound tormented riles me.
she wasnt jewish, but she used that to detatch herself further from her
father Otto, because he was German. to make it that she was as tormented
in a physical sense as people who were tortured in the holocaust must be
justified by her mental state-but the fact that she condemns people
(peanut-crunching crowd) for reading her poems, confuses me-Plath's whole
life was geared towards becoming this amazing writer, to be respected by
everyone.

Heather from United Kingdom

Comment 15 of 63, added on November 1st, 2005 at 10:06 AM.

No, Plath was not Jewish; however, her father was German: Otto Plath, a
rather cold, withdrawn expert on, of all things, bees. He wrote a
relatively respected book on the subject. Because he was never much of a
part of her life, part of her more confessional poetry is the search for
understanding of him and of how she relates to him as his daughter, how he
has shaped her genetically, intellectually, emotionally.

One of the elements of the poem that I have always admired is the symbol of
things being stripped away from the narrator. Perhaps this is why the
skeletal concentration camp survivors become so important in this poem. Her
rebirth, her resurrection, is as a new being, having shed those parts which
she no longer needs. Perhaps what she loses is the power of society--and
men in particular--to intimidate her. The villains of this piece are male,
certainly, but, by the end of the poem, after several deaths, she is able
to say that she now has power, that she eats "men like air." Rebirth, for
the narrator is not the resurrection of the original body, but the birth of
something quite new and more essential, more real than what had died.

Elizabeth from United States