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Amelia Willadsen
Cline
ENG102
15 September 2011
The Art of Poetry
Poetry is an imaginative awareness of experience expressed through meaning, sound, and rhythmic language choices so as to evoke an emotional response. I think poetry could have many different meanings to the reader but only the writer knows exactly what their poem is about. Poetry is nearly impossible to understand because most authors use such a distinct language throughout their work. I am not a big poetry fan; however, I think it can be very beautiful to read. The tone, imagery, and rhyme in poems are what make the actual poem exciting to read.
I chose to examine the poem, “Lady Lazarus” by Sylvia Plath because out of all the poems available, this is the one that caught my attention the most. I have read this poem over and over again to try and figure out what Plath was really talking about throughout her poem. When I first started reading it, I didn’t know what to think exactly; I was a little confused. When I read,
“I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I’ve a call”,
I thought maybe she has cancer and she is describing exactly how it feels to have such an
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awful disease.
I noticed Sylvia Plath’s use of intense language. She uses language that I consider eerie or frightening but that kind of language is what caught my attention so quickly. She puts hair-raising words together to make the imagery that much more effective like, “And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls”, and “That melts to a shriek”. I was stunned on how great the imagery was in “Lady Lazarus”. I could picture the things she was saying perfectly in my head with nothing blurry at all. In my opinion, this poem had the best imagery out of any other poem.
Sylvia Plath included some rhyme in her poem but it wasn’t consistent throughout the whole thing. This is one out of few stanzas where she rhymes,
“Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air”.
I didn’t understand this stanza at all and it keeps me wondering after the many times I have read it. This is an example of when I said the author is the only one that knows exactly what it means. This is a stanza that didn’t rhyme at all,
“A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot.”
She has many stanzas that don’t rhyme, however not all poems have to rhyme to be considered good. I like poems that rhyme better because I think it becomes easier to read. Rhyming creates a rhythm and it makes the poem flow nicely throughout.
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After reading “Lady Lazarus” for the second time I began to think of more ideas about what Plath might be talking about. I came to the conclusion that she is talking about committing suicide attempts more than once. I got this idea because she states,
“And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.”
When I read this stanza I was confused because I was asking myself, why does she have nine times to die? Another reason I thought she has committed suicide is because she includes,
“Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.
The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut.”
I asked myself, what else could she mean by this? After reading these two stanzas, I made up my mind. There’s no doubt in my head that she’s not talking about committing suicide.
In conclusion, I thought this poem came straight from the author’s heart. I liked how Plath’s poem was so realistic because suicide is still such a serious issue today.
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I thought the poem had great word choice to make the poem that much more interesting to read. Although I’m not a huge poetry fan, this poem made me think a lot about what she was talking about. For that reason, I enjoyed “Lady Lazarus”.
