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Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.

Skin

In “Lady Lazarus,” the speaker shows great concern about what her scarred skin reveals and conceals. Skin is the interface between an individual and their surrounding environment, interactions between which indelibly mark the body. As someone who has attempted suicide on multiple occasions, the speaker has intentionally marked her own skin, leaving scars. The speaker is concerned both that her scars are too visible and not visible enough. They’re too visible in the sense that people readily notice them and want to know how she got them. The speaker acknowledges the grim curiosity of others when she declares, “For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge” (line 58). However, her scars also aren’t visible enough in the sense that their mere presence on her skin cannot convey the depths of her torment. This is especially true now that her doctor has miraculously restored her skin’s pallid tone (lines 4–9):

                                            my skin
     Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
     . . . 
     My face a featureless, fine
     Jew linen.

The speaker’s skin has undergone a transformation like that in which a suffering Jewish person’s face, marked with sorrow and pain, is rendered featureless when made into “a Nazi lampshade.” Such a transformation cruelly erases the signs of her torment.

Pure Gold Baby

Near the end of the poem, when the speaker directly addresses her physician, she identifies herself, strangely, as a “pure gold baby.” The reference appears in the following passage (lines 65–71):

     So, so, Herr Doktor.
     So, Herr Enemy.

     I am your opus,
     I am your valuable,
     The pure gold baby

     That melts to a shriek.
     I turn and burn.

The general sense of this passage is that the speaker represents something of value to the doctor. But she’s not just a generic kind of “valuable,” like an heirloom chest or an antique vase. She’s also his greatest creation, his “opus.” The speaker unites these senses of value and creation in her references to the “pure gold baby” that gets thrown into the fire. Although it isn’t perfectly clear what the speaker is talking about here, one possible interpretation is that this object is a gold ingot, where ingot simply refers to an oblong block of precious metal. Ingots are valuable and can be saved up for their monetary value. However, they can also be melted down and cast into new forms. If the speaker is a “pure gold baby,” it means she has been reduced to little more than abstract value, and therefore dehumanized. Furthermore, the fact that the ingot takes the shape of a baby is infantilizing, symbolizing a denial of the speaker’s agency as an adult woman.

Ash

The end of “Lady Lazarus” is dominated by images of ash, which together serve as a symbol of both death and resurrection. As the poem draws toward its conclusion, the speaker imagines herself being cremated in a flame of such intense heat that her body is totally reduced to ash (lines 73–78):

     Ash, ash—
     You poke and stir.
     Flesh, bone, there is nothing there——

     A cake of soap,
     A wedding ring,
     A gold filling.

The speaker’s invocation of ash in these lines is linked to the poem’s allusions to the Holocaust, when the Nazis performed large-scale cremations of the victims of their horrific genocide. In this regard, the reference to ash symbolizes physical suffering, mental torment, and death. At the same time, however, the speaker evidently wishes to die. Indeed, it is the speaker’s strongest desire to be so thoroughly obliterated that nothing of her person remains, leaving no traces from which to resurrect her. Only through death will she enact her own agency, which, despite resulting in the end of her life, will paradoxically enable her rebirth:

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

In these lines (lines 82–84), the speaker references the phoenix, a mythological bird that periodically burns up then rises from its own ashes. Like the phoenix, the speaker will revive on her own terms and lay waste to those men who denied her agency in life.

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