"Lady Lazarus" is a poem written by Sylvia Plath, originally included in Ariel, which was published in 1965, two years after her death by suicide.
According to the American poet and critic, Macha Rosenthal, Plath's poetry is confessional due to the way that she uses psychological shame and vulnerability, centers herself as the speaker, and represents the civilization she is living in.
[1] According to scholar Parvin Ghasemi, Lady Lazarus is written in "light verse containing the intense desire to die and be born; it is a poem of personal pain, suffering, and revenge".
Ghasemi addresses this, by quoting English poet Al Alvarez when he states, "her trick is to tell this horror story in a verse form as insistently jaunty and ritualistic as a nursery rhyme".
According to Clark, "Sylvia understood from a young age that the German identity she shared with her father was somehow dangerous—a secret source of shame".
[6]These stanzas address the deadliness of the Holocaust in general, Ghasemi writes, and more particularly the burning of dead bodies that occurred in the crematoriums at the concentration camps.