The main concern of Sylvia Plath's poem “Lady Lazarus” is how the speaker perceives her relationship with men; the emotions associated with her view of sex are equated with death and the desire for her to die. This metaphor of death, used throughout the poem, echoes how she views sex as an act worse than death, and how the institution of marriage is not only a prison, but can for her to be compared to a Nazi concentration camp. By analyzing each metaphorical section (the concentration camp, the mummy Lazarus, the circus, and the phoenix) and examining literary techniques such as enjambment and line repetition, one can conclude that the speaker has equated marriage and conventional relationships to a prison (or concentration camp), and once trapped by that, she would rather consider herself dead, rather than acknowledge the sexual acts committed in that marriage. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay starting with the second stanza and continuing through the third: “Bright as a Nazi lampshade, / My right foot / A paperweight, / My face is fine, featureless Jewish linen” (lines 5-9) -- one can immediately see how she is comparing something (which we later learn is related) to the Holocaust, specifically the way the Nazis viewed Jews as household goods. worth nothing more than the material goods resulting from their torture and, ultimately, their death. The speaker's focus on objects commonly found in the home is symbolic in that she feels trapped in domestic life, as a possession, where she also feels tortured. This also sets the tone of the poem as a personal holocaust, due to the persecution she fears and experiences. The second metaphor to examine is that of Lazarus, the poem's namesake. Like Lazarus, the speaker feels that she has the power to rise from the dead. Soon, soon the flesh / The cave of the eaten tomb will be / At home at home. / And I am a smiling woman. (16-20) This passage refers to the resurrection of Lazarus from the dead coming out of the cave. The speaker uses this to show her inner strength: that when she is forced into a cave, along with a relationship, she will emerge better than before, that this rebirth will end this torturous period and that she will smile outwardly throughout the ordeal. In the next stanza, lines 23 and 24 -- "What trash / Wipe out every decade" -- show the reader that she equates something with death, that about every ten years something powerful happens that l requires viewing the last decade. decade as a waste. This is the emergence of his vision of sex in the poem. Here she is referring to a forced sexual act, or form of abuse, that has happened twice in the speaker's life, and that she fears will happen again. Stanzas 12 and 13 give us a limited glimpse of the speaker; she notes in lines 35 and 36: “The first time it happened, I was ten years old. / It was an accident. Now it has been established that she equates death with sex, because it is impossible that she actually died a physical death at the age of ten; her assertion that it was an accident shows her youthful innocence, that even twenty years later she can argue that a sexual act could have been an accident. In the next stanza she states, “The second time I meant / Hold on and not come back at all” (37-38). This passage simply lets the reader know that the second time,., 2002. 519-521.