Lakhasly

Throughout "Lady Lazarus," the speaker uses extended metaphors of death and resurrection to express her own personal suffering. The speaker compares herself to Lazarus (a biblical reference to a man Jesus raised from the dead), telling the reader that she has died multiple times, and is, in fact, dead when the poem begins. However, through external forces, the speaker is brought back to life time and time again. For Lazarus, his resurrection was a joyous event, and one might assume that all such resurrections would be happy. But the speaker of the poem subverts that expectation: she wants to die. And so the efforts of those who want to save her—whether loved ones, or doctors, or whoever else—feel to the speaker like selfish, controlling acts committed against her wishes.

Obviously, the speaker is not actually dead, but uses this metaphor to demonstrate how unbearable life is and, in turn, explain (and perhaps justify) her suicide attempts. Thus, the reader can interpret the poem as the musings of a suicidal mind, with death being alternately presented as freedom, escape from suffering, and the achievement of a sort of peace.

Throughout the poem, the speaker often contrasts life and death by using imagery that subverts the reader's expectations. Note how the speaker describes life through disturbing images, such as comparing her skin to a "Nazi lampshade," or describing her resurrection as "flesh / the grave cave ate will be / at home on me." This imagery is surprisingly applied to the speaker's living body after it is resurrected. The speaker describes her experience of living as a kind of torture, almost as a kind of death—when she is brought back to life, her skin is like the dead skin of someone killed in the Holocaust, it is the skin of a dead woman forced back onto her living self. Thus, the speaker demonstrates how living, for her, is what death feels like for most people.

In contrast, the speaker describes death as a kind of calmness. For instance, when the speaker describes her second suicide attempt, the imagery evokes the peacefulness of the sea: the speaker tells the reader she "rocked shut," alluding to the rhythmic, calming waves of the ocean, while the "worms" or maggots that invade a decaying corpse are depicted as "pearls." The speaker also transforms into a "seashell," shedding her skin to become a creature with a hard, outer shell, implying that for her death offers blissful solitude and protection.

For the speaker, skin, which falls away in death, is a symbol that the speaker is still alive. When she is resurrected against her will, the “flesh the grave cave ate” reappears on her. The speaker's disdain for her skin seems to stem in part from the fact that the skin both displays and is the receptacle of the pain and suffering of life. The speaker at one point mentions others "eyeing .. my scars," capturing both how skin is scarred by trauma, but also how skin displays that trauma for the world to see. In this way, the speaker's skin subjects her to what she believes is an intolerable invasion of privacy. Death offers protection from that invasion.

When the speaker begins the poem, she reveals that she is currently dead—it can be assumed that she has tried to kill herself. She tells the reader she will be reborn as the woman she was. However, by the end of the poem, the speaker has transformed into a phoenix: “Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air.” Although this is seemingly a moment of empowerment for the speaker, this turn also conveys the hopelessness the speaker feels about her situation. The phoenix, a mythological creature, is known for its regenerative abilities. Thus, like the speaker, the phoenix dies and is reborn. However, because the speaker has transformed into a phoenix at the end of the poem, this could signify that the speaker is stuck in a cycle of dying and being reborn that she can neither escape nor control. In this way, the speaker expresses the intolerability of her life—though, logically, the reader understands that the speaker is not truly immortal, the speaker demonstrates that her life is so insufferable that it feels as though her life will continue indefinitely, through the exhausting patterns of suicide and being saved and brought back to a life she does not want. This pattern, in turn, also explains why death is so desirable for the speaker: because she feels as though she cannot die, and must suffer forever, death is the only solution to end her suffering.