Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air.
So ends Plath’s Lady Lazarus and with it, one of the most badass endings to a poem I have yet read.
This is par-for-course for her, and it is one of the reasons that this anthology - Ariel - caught my interest so much even after a first read. In short verse and varying voice, I feel like this is as close to poetic dynamite as I’ve found. Written in the years leading up to her tragic suicide from the confines of her troubling marriage to poet laureate Ted Hughes , Plath’s poems run the gamut from depressed housewife, to liberated creator; from an uncherished lover to enraged life-giver. In her quieter, more sorrowful moments, the reader is asked to peer behind the curtain of her authorial glamour to see the burdened, constrictive life of mid-20th century femineity. As in Morning Song or Nick and the Candlestick , she struggles with self-effacement, acknowledging the productive power of woman but readily aware of the loss of identity this portends. Yet jump a few poems forward or back, and this melancholy seems wildy at odds with the vivid reclamation of a distinctly female creative force. Poems like Lady Lazarus and Cut take famously male epithets, as in the former, or jarringly “un-ladylike” motifs, as in the latter, and flip them on their heads, with Plath offering what appears at times to be a victory lap, parading in her literary flair.
It is this combination, along with her fascinating albeit tragic life, that makes this work so compelling to consume. It was certainly the case studying her work in my final year of high-school literature, and I present here some essays written from those studies.
