Sylvia Plath

In her poem, “Lady Lazarus”, Sylvia Plath invokes frightening images of the holocaust in order to illustrate her feelings of turmoil and acceptance of death. This poem’s main goal is to illustrate the speaker’s comfortability with death, displayed not only by her holocaust metaphors, but also by the fact that she gloats about her ability to not only die, but to do it well. The poem’s speaker first calls up the great tragedy when she states that her skin is “bright as a Nazi lampshade”. This use of holocaust imagery immediately conjures images of death and despair. The fact that the despair belongs to the speaker becomes evident when she refers to her face as a “Jew linen” in the next stanza. The speaker as identified the fact that in the metaphor of the holocaust, she plays the part of the victim. Throughout the poem, she refers to figures often associated with death (God, Lucifer) as “Herr”, which is German for Mister. The speaker furthers the metaphor that she is a holocaust victim by using the same language and titles that holocaust victims would have to use when they met their captors. The speaker goes on to welcome death saying that she’s got “nine lives”, and that she’s already used up two of them. The language refers to one near death experience when the speaker was only a child that was an “accident”, but also to a purposeful attempt on her life in which she tried to “last it out and not come back at all,”. The speaker not only has experience with dying, but welcomes death as a personal talent. She states that she “[dies] exceptionally well,” indicating the fact that she does not meet death with fear, but rather with eagerness. The speaker of this poem is not only comfortable with death, but she welcomes it. Not only does this poem’s speaker welcome death, but she believes there are certain degrees of difficulty to the act of taking one’s own life. She states that “It’s easy enough to do it in a cell,” and then goes on to make a point that it’s the “theatrical” type of death that she prefers.

In “Daddy” the speaker takes up a similar position as she once again relates herself to the part of a holocaust victim. Her father is at first compared to a black shoe in which she’s been forced to live, and then his massive size, from the California coast all the way to the Atlantic, is alluded to before the speaker finally comes out and begins speaking German again. She conjures up images of conquered Poland, and then lists the concentration camps in which she feels like she’s been imprisoned by the presence of her father. She brings forward the image of Adolf Hitler as she refers to her father’s “neat mustache”, and then to his “luftwaffe,” the Nazi air force and Hitler’s most powerful weapon. Her father’s long-lasting effect on her becomes evident when she states that she “though every German was [him]”. The speaker’s relationship to her father is equated to that of a Jew and a Nazi, and because of that she sees every man as a German. The severity of the speaker’s trauma can be noted when she begins to describe the man she found to take her father’s place as Hitler, as she states that she made a model of him with a “Meinkampf” attitude. Here the speaker alludes to Hitler’s famous literary work which started the Nazi movement in Germany. The speaker wraps up her interpretation of the horribleness that was her father by referring to him as a vampire that she has slain. Her resolution seems to be clear as she states that there is a “stake in [his] fat black heart,” indicating that she has slain the demon’s of her father that had haunted her. The speaker’s final opinion on her “daddy” seems to be that she has overcome whatever power he once held over her as she ends her poem simply with the line “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.”