Lady Lazarus: Important Quotes Explained

I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it——

The speaker opens the poem (lines 1–3) with these darkly comic lines, in which she makes a grim joke about her inability to succeed in killing herself. The irony comes in the double meaning of the lines, “One year in every ten / I manage it.” Since these are the first lines in the poem, the reader doesn’t know yet what the speaker is referring to. But as soon as we learn that she’s speaking about suicide, the joke becomes clear. That is, she jokes that while she’s been successful in making attempts on her own life once every decade, the attempts themselves have not been successful. But despite the speaker’s dark humor, her words are clearly laced with profound anguish. The torment and grim comedy that comes together in these opening lines help establish a bitterly ironic tone that persists throughout the remainder of the poem.

Peel off the napkin
O my enemy.
Do I terrify?——

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.

Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me

And I a smiling woman.

These lines (lines 10–19) help establish the basic conceit that metaphorically links the speaker’s recovery to the resurrection of the biblical figure of Lazarus. The Gospel of John recounts the story of Jesus Christ resurrecting Lazarus four days after his death and burial. The speaker envisions Lazarus as a kind of mummy, whose burial wrap had to be removed upon his resurrection. Likewise, the speaker imagines her whole body wrapped in bandages. She addresses her doctor (“O my enemy”) and instructs him to “peel off the napkin”—that is, to remove the gauze covering her face. If, like Lazarus, she has just been revived, she imagines that her degraded appearance will initially be quite upsetting. It will take time, she asserts, before the flesh that rotted away in the “grave cave” will return to her body. Only then will she again become the “smiling woman” she once was. Of course, the speaker’s resurrection is only metaphorical: in fact, she’s recovering from a suicide attempt. Remembering this fact brings the speaker’s torment into painful focus. Indeed, the speaker never was a “smiling woman,” which means that the doctor’s work is not about restoration. Rather, it’s about torturing her for her failure—or refusal—to be happy.

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so if feels real.
I guess you could say I’ve a call.

The speaker utters these words (lines 43–48) about halfway through the poem. With these two tercets, the speaker revives the bitterly ironic dark humor that marked the poem’s opening stanza. In this case, the speaker describes her suicidal ideation as a kind of professional calling. Whereas some people might feel a calling to become an artist or an engineer, the speaker feels like her life’s purpose is to die. She bolsters this surprising claim by describing the act of dying as an art. The speaker excels at this art insofar as she can do serious harm to herself. Yet ultimately the speaker’s words here are deeply ironic. She knows well that the evidence goes against her claim that she performs the art of dying “exceptionally well.” After all, she has not actually managed to kill herself. The speaker is therefore repeating a similar version of the grim, macabre humor that she used to open the poem.

For the eying of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart——
It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.

In this passage (lines 58–64), which appears two-thirds of the way into the poem, the speaker references the painful experience of being examined by medical personnel after her most recent suicide attempt. Instead of describing the traumatic experience directly, the speaker compares herself to a martyred saint. The doctor and nurses, represented here as pilgrims, treat her body like the faithful treat the corpses of saints. The faithful make pilgrimages to behold the holy remains of a saint’s body, examining them, touching them, and maybe even stealing away with a fragment of hair or clothing. Likewise, medical personnel take blood samples and examine her wounds and scars. Significantly, there’s an ironic reversal that underlies this passage. Whereas pilgrims paid for the privilege to interact with and be healed by holy relics, in this case it’s the medical personnel who charge her for the invasive and objectifying examinations that have saved her life.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.

The speaker concludes the poem (lines 79–84) with these fierce words of warning to those men who represent the toxicity of patriarchy. For the speaker, the patriarchy is best symbolized as a sort of Unholy Trinity. Along with “Herr God” and “Herr Lucifer,” mentioned here, the third axis of this Trinity is “Herr Doktor” (line 65)—that is, the doctor who recently negated her wish to die by saving her life. Taken together, this Unholy Trinity represents a patriarchal society that refuses women their bodily autonomy. In the speaker’s case, she suffers from men’s expectation for her to act like a happily domesticated “smiling woman” (line 19). Yet when she attempts to opt out of this expectation, men likewise refuse to respect her agency. Thus, with these final lines, the speaker unleashes her rage at the men who hold her back and obstruct her autonomy. First, she cautions them to “beware.” Then she imagines herself as a kind of demonic phoenix, rising from her own ashes and devouring the men who stood in her way.