“Lady Lazarus”
“Lady Lazarus” is a free verse poem comprising of 25 three line stanzas. This poem is a companion piece to “Daddy,” another of Plath’s most famous poems. Within “Lady Lazarus,” a strange tension exists between the solemn subject matter and the deceptively light tone and form of the piece. The language and rhythm are both of a conversational style, which are in direct contrast with the violence depicted in the words. A good example of this is in the ninth and tenth stanzas: “What a million filaments. / The peanut-crunching crowd / Shoves in to see / Them unwrap me hand and foot / The big strip tease.”
The mentions of suicide in this poem reflect Plath’s personal experience. The poet compares her anguish with the suffering of the Jews in the second world war. As a result of committing suicide she is becoming a Jew “A sort of walking miracle, my skin / Bright as a Nazi lampshade.”
“Electra on Azalea Path”
This poem explores Plath's visit to her father's grave who died when she was eight. It comprises of five stanzas, most of which are around ten lines in length.
The opening two stanzas speak of the narrator’s denial of her father’s death. As Plath was so young and did not see his corpse, she believed he could still be alive. Alternatively, she implies that perhaps he never existed at all: “As if you never existed, as if I came /
God-fathered into the world from my mother's belly.” The third, and middle, stanza of the poem refers to the graveyard: “In this charity ward, this poorhouse, where the dead / Crowd foot to foot, head to head”
In the final stanza, Plath mentions the gangrene that killed her father: “It was the gangrene ate you to the bone.” When she then speaks of suicide she is referring to his death which, arguably, he brought on himself by refusing to recognise his illness. The line, “It was my love that did us both to death” is possibly the most poignant of the whole poem. As children feel all-powerful in the world, they can also take on an inappropriate amount of responsibility for things going wrong. As a child, it is possible that Plath felt she were to blame for her father’s death.
“The Colossus”
“The Colossus” is another of Plath’s poems exploring her relationship with her deceased father. Her father is viewed as a magnificent but damaged statue: “O father, all by yourself / You are pithy and historical as the Roman Forum.”
The poet refers to her longing to reach her father and to either resurrect him or to put his existence into perspective. She loves her father but hates him because he left her to die and, furthermore, hates him because he still has such a hold over her life.
Plath effectively employs the statue as a symbol for her father's authority which no longer exists. She has chosen to write with relatively colloquial language and to use this to speak to her father: “I shall never get you put together entirely, / Pieced, glued, and properly jointed.”
The symbolic scene containing mythical gods depicted in “The Colossus” is summarising the permanent fact that the past is as dead as Plath’s father, yet she is still living in its shadow and seems unable to escape.
