Lady Lazarus

Throughout “Lady Lazarus,” the speaker describes her experiences with death and resurrection with a tone of cynical disdain. The title is a reference to the New Testament story of Lazarus, a dead man on whom Jesus performed a miracle by bringing him back to life. The Lady Lazarus of the title is the speaker of the poem, and she does not experience neither relief nor joy at being repeatedly brought back to life. Instead, the speaker describes dying as a painful and relentless endeavor that she must repeat nine times.

The poem opens with the speaker’s most recent death: “I have done it again” (Line 1). The plain language of the first line of the poem lends a sense of routine, suggesting that the speaker has experienced death before, most likely by her own hand. The speaker declares that death happens at regular intervals throughout her life, which makes her a kind of “walking miracle” (Line 4), which is another allusion to the Bible story of Lazarus.

That the speaker is able to survive death is a remarkable feat, but the speaker experiences the miracle as highly taxing and burdensome. She uses