Written 5/7/2018
Sylvia Plath and Elizabeth Bishop were both prominent female, American poets of the 20th century. Along with sharing the same gender and originating from the same country and era, Plath and Bishop were also similar in the way they used their poetry to channel their emotions and experiences from their traumatic lives from their childhood to their demise. Plath’s and Bishop’s lyric poetry use their experiences and distinctive poetic style to convey their nuanced interpretation of the relationship between individual and society through unique characterizations of the speaker of the poem. Though many of Plath’s poems demonstrate how she approaches the world, from “Daddy” to “The Sisters of Persephone,” “Lady Lazarus” from her posthumously published collection Ariel is her most confessional poem that lets us peer into her mind. Bishop’s poem, “In the Waiting Room,” is also one of her more personal poems, serving the same purpose. In both poems, the poets use the lyric I to ultimately channel their experiences to illustrate what they perceive to be the problematic aspects of the relationship between the individual, “I,” and society, “them,” though they come to radically different conclusions.
For both Plath and Bishop, their troubled pasts lent them the experiences they touch upon in their poetry. The daughter of an authoritarian German professor, Plath’s father raised her to be ambitious, but died from complications of diabetes when she was just eight. Her relationship with her father and his early death influenced her poetry greatly, especially in her elegiac poem “Daddy.” Despite early success, publishing her poems in a national publication just after graduating high school and remaining an exceptional student through college, Plath fell into deep depression and attempted suicide during her time in university. After graduation, Plath met and married English poet Ted Hughes, having two children with him. Less than a decade after their marriage, Hughes left Plath for another woman, and that winter, Plath wrote the poems in her famous book Ariel. The next year, Plath committed suicide using her gas oven. Death and depression were dominant factors in Bishop’s life as well. Her father died when she was less than a year old, and her mother was committed to a mental asylum. She was passed around between her maternal and paternal relatives, from Nova Scotia to Worcester and South Boston. She then traveled the world after earning her bachelor’s degree. She lived in Brazil with her female lover Lota de Macedo Soares until Lota committed suicide, upon which Bishop began to live in the United States, taking a teaching position in Harvard. It is only with this context that the threads of the poems make sense – the scenes they choose, the emotions they convey, and the people they yearn and mock.
Both “Lady Lazarus” and “In the Waiting Room” are lyric poems from the first-person perspective, presumably from the perspective of the writer. Especially for Bishop, whose writings often focus more on the detailed observation of nature and travel, “In the Waiting Room” unveils a side the audience often doesn’t get to see. Whenever “I” appears in poetry, the question of who “I” exactly refers to arises. In both these poems, it is easy to say that it represents the poet. In “Lady Lazarus,” the poem starts out with, “I have done it again / One year in every ten / I manage it -” (Plath 1-3). It is commonly accepted that this refers to Plath’s skirts with death, rounded to the nearest ten years. When she was ten, Plath almost drowned, and as the poem said, “It was an accident” (Plath 36). “The second time” (Plath 37) refers to her suicide attempt in college, where she intended “to last it out and not come back at all” (Plath 38). This interpretation that “I” refers to Plath is further corroborated by, “I am only thirty. / And like the cat I have nine times to die” (Plath 20-21). Plath wrote this poem when she was thirty years old, and she died the year after, which was foreshadowed by the line, “This is Number Three” (Plath 22). “In the Waiting Room” also points strongly to “I” referring to the poet, Bishop. It begins with “In Worcester, Massachusetts, I went with Aunt Consuelo” (Bishop 1-2). This evidently refers to her childhood when she lived with her paternal relatives in Worcester. The poem also directly states that the speaker thinks, “you are an Elizabeth” (Bishop 61). The timelines match perfectly as well, as Bishop was born on February 8th, 1911, while the poem takes place “the fifth of February, 1918” (Bishop 98-99), which would have made Bishop exactly as the poem says, in “three days / and you’ll be seven years old” (Bishop 54-55).
There are also discrepancies between the content of the poems and the writers’ lives which indicate the purpose of these poems is to convey a deeper message rather than simply to describe their history and associated emotions. In “Lady Lazarus,” Plath ends the poem saying that “I rise with my red hair” (Plath 83), and though she has had brown and blonde hair, she has never had red. And obviously, she has not actually died and come back to life in the two incidents she described. Similarly, in “In the Waiting Room,” Bishop’s aunt was not called Consuelo in real life, and the disturbing image she describes of dead natives does not actually appear in the February, 1918 edition of National Geographic. The speaker also often uses vocabulary and imagery that is beyond the scope of a normal six-year-old. Though it is easy to say that these are embellished details for dramatic effect, they also cause the reader to question the literality of these texts. What we find is that the focus is not on the events themselves, but rather, the questioning of whether they actually happened and the constructed emotions surrounding them. This serves to blur the lines between us, the audience, and the speaker and contents of the poem, which we find is not so clear-cut after all.
Plath characterizes the “I” in Lady Lazarus through her use of poetic devices and structure, painting an image of an angry, unpredictable, and desperate woman. The tone of “Lady Lazarus” is aggressive and forceful throughout, with word choices such as “trash,” “annihilate,” “shriek,” and “Lucifer.” The form is comprised of free verse tercets, twenty-eight of them to be exact. Each tercet is made up of choppy lines of unpredictable lengths, with a varied mix of enjambment and end-stopped lines. This seemingly random form contributes to the biting tone of the poem, as if the speaker is forcing each word through gritted teeth, spitting at us. The rhyme scheme is also unpredictable, with some slant rhymes and some perfect rhymes placed irregularly. Plath also has sections of anaphora, repeating phrases and words to hammer in her message. We will see these rhetorical devices in action as we analyze the lines and what they mean closer. Together, they give the poem an off-balance feel, surprising the reader at every turn, heightening the effect of each successive passage.
Plath further characterizes the speaker of the poem by explaining the significance and motivations of the speaker’s deaths and resurrections. The title of the piece, “Lady Lazarus,” is a clear reference to the biblical tale of Jesus’s resurrection of Lazarus. The narrator is similar to Lazarus in her resurrection – however, the key differences are that she is female, that she has been resurrected multiple times, and lastly, that she able to resurrect herself, putting her in a position of power that Lazarus did not have. This is evidenced by the first stanza, where she exclaims, “I have done it again. / One year in every ten / I manage it –” (Plath 1-3). She explains why she dies, using repetition of the beginning phrase to mimic the repetition of her deaths, that “I do it exceptionally well. / I do it so it feels like hell. / I do it so it feels real” (Plath 45-47). In both of these passages, we are drawn to the focus on “I” performing “it,” the action of dying, over and over. The rhyming of the first two lines of both passages followed by an unrhymed end-stopped line helps highlight this importance of Lady Lazarus, “I,” being the sole commander of whether she lives or dies. She finds control in being able to die, to feel real, though she hates herself for being unable to keep herself from resorting to that escape as her life spirals downwards, describing it as “What a trash / To annihilate each decade” (Plath 23-24). However, she struggles with this perception of control, as her last solace is appropriated by “them,” the others, and the audience that does nothing but watch this injustice with glee.
The greatest conflict in this poem is between the speaker and those who seek to exploit her suffering and pain. The speaker fights against “them,” stating that “They had to call and call / And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls” (Plath 41-42) and others watching “Them unwrap me hand and foot-” (Plath 28). Each time she dies, “they” bring her back, literally unwrapping the bandages off her body and picking off the worms consuming her rotting corpse. The speaker seems to almost yearn for the finality of uninterrupted death, not answering “their” calls and describing the worms as “sticky pearls,” attributing precious value to creatures associated with disgust and decay. These worms are the jewels she wishes to adorn herself with, and the stickiness not only represents the physical adherence of worms, but also how tightly death clings to her and the effort “they” put in to pry her back for their own needs. The ones not directly bringing her back bear responsibility as well, as they are the ones providing the demand for her suffering as entertainment, treating her resurrection like a circus act – these consumers described as “The peanut-crunching crowd” (Plath 26).
Thus, Plath sets the stage in “Lady Lazarus” of the battle between “I” and “them,” of Plath, a woman, and a poet versus her family, the patriarchal society, and the very readers who consume her poetry. “Lady Lazarus” is very much a poem of a depressed Plath railing against the injustices perpetuated upon her by the cruel world she has struggled to stay in. In the first conflict, Plath expresses her troubled relationships with her father and ex-husband. Her controversial usage of Holocaust metaphors references her father’s German roots, and they also parallel her experiences with the suffering the Jews faced upon persecution by the Nazis in order to make her private experiences even a little bit more publicly understandable. In the second and third stanzas, Lady Lazarus describes herself as “A sort of walking miracle, my skin / Bright as a Nazi lampshade, / My right foot / A paperweight, / My face a featureless, fine / Jew linen” (Plath 4-9). In these two tercets, she compares herself to both the Nazis and the Jews, acknowledging that while she shares familial blood with her father, as reflected in her very skin, she is also an exploited victim, her father’s harsh treatment of her leaving her face “featureless,” emotionally impaired and traumatized. She is weighed down by her father even after death, the “right foot / A paperweight,” a reflection of the amputated foot that took her father’s life. The Holocaust references continue, as she continues to describe those who exploit her as “Herr Doktor” and “Herr Enemy” (Plath 5-6). Her death and resurrection is valuable to “them,” her father, who pushed Plath to achieve without regard to her mental wellbeing, her ex-husband, who ironically published her collection for her posthumously, and us, the hypocritical readers, “the peanut crunching crowd” who casually discuss the merits and emotions of her work without truly understanding the pain and suffering she endured to create such impactful pieces, just as she is criticized for not truly understanding the pain and suffering of the Jews during the Holocaust. It is hard enough to struggle alone, but as a famous poet thrust into the spotlight with each poetic cry for help, her struggles were actually put on display for the amusement of others, and she describes, “It’s the theatrical / Comeback in broad day … That knocks me out” (Plath 51-52, 56). Lastly, as a woman, Plath faced an uphill battle in gaining the respect of her peers, a universal experience for women, especially as she eschewed typical gender roles and norms. To the editors, critics, and readers, being a woman heightened her exoticness, and akin to the sexualization of strippers, “the big strip tease” (Plath 29) as Plath called it, the peeling away of her emotions provided that carnal joy to her voyeuristic audience. Plath, and others like her, have been commercialized by the capitalistic society we live in that does not care about the individual, but rather, what they can produce. In a hopeful note, Plath ends “Lady Lazarus” with “Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air” (Plath 82-84), stating that she will continue to fight against the men that have used her, even if she will have transformed into a demon. She will regain control of her life, and the men will be like “air,” or nothing in the face of her wrath. Together, Plath paints a picture of a world that is “I” versus “them,” a single person raging against everyone who just wants to take advantage of her.
The way Bishop chooses to characterize the “I” in “In the Waiting Room” differs from the way Plath did it in “Lady Lazarus.” While “Lady Lazarus” was explicit in stating and using visceral metaphors to demonstrate the speaker’s feelings, as characteristic of confessional poetry, “In the Waiting Room” takes a more nuanced approach, conventionally described as “show not tell,” arising from Bishop’s disdain of confessional poetry and her preference to instead describe the world in order to lead the audience to feel their own emotions. The poem reads like a scene out of a novel, following the coming to age of a girl. We are introduced to the setting and circumstances, where our speaker accompanies her aunt to the dentist on an early winter evening. Though the narrator does not say so directly, we can tell she is young and that she is acutely aware of her age, as noted by “The waiting room / was full of grown-up people / arctics and overcoats, / lamps and magazines” (Bishop 8-10). There is a distinct chasm the speaker notices between her and the adults around her to the point that she compares them to the physical objects around the room. The adults are reduced to the heavy winter coats they wear or have taken off, as if the narrator is too short or too shy to look at the faces of the people around her, just an anonymous crowd. The short lines with regular enjambment and end-stopped lines using periods, commas, and semicolons also serve to moderate the reader’s pace, reminding us of a hesitant girl nervously looking up only to quickly duck her head down over and over.
However, our speaker tries to assert herself, stating “and while I waited I read / the National Geographic / (I could read)…” (Bishop 13-15). In telling us that she can read National Geographic, making particular emphasis on that fact that she can read, she tries to move herself closer to the adulthood that terrifies her, showing us that she is mature enough to read the news. Ironically, confronted with the violent and gory photographs, we see that she is greatly disturbed. “Their breasts were horrifying. / I read it right straight through. / I was too shy to stop” (Bishop 31-33). The short, end-stopped lines with periods are like the turning of each page, as if leading us through each picture along with the speaker. She is “too shy to stop,” supporting the image of the timid girl, but who is the group of people that she is shy for? Here, just like with “Lady Lazarus,” we see the presence of “them.” “Their” is used in the aforementioned section, referring to the native woman who were strung up and photographed. The speaker, who has never encountered such naked violence, could not stop looking at the pictures in the magazine because of her growing realization that the figures before her were people too, one of the adults she yearned to be. There is a gap between her, the adults around her in the waiting room, and the victims photographed on the pages before her – she is troubled by how they all intertwine, stating in words of a child trying to articulate a foreign abstraction, “But I felt: you are an I, / you are an Elizabeth / you are one of them. / Why should you be one, too?” (Bishop 60-63). The “them” here refers to adulthood, something that no longer seems as appealing after the consumption of the National Geographic magazine. The speaker reiterates that she belongs in that waiting room with the adults, but now she questions why she wanted so badly to belong in the first place.
While Plath had set the stage for the battle between “I” and “them,” Bishop brings together the idea that “I” equals “them,” that it is “us” and “we.” And again, just as with “Lady Lazarus,” this scene that Bishop plays out for us represents the multifaceted nature between the individual and society. The poem can be taken to be the loss of innocence of a child faced with the realities of puberty (hence the fixation on breasts, whether the speaker is developing her own or possible sexual arousal referencing Bishop’s orientation), but that interpretation does not sufficiently explain how “I,” the speaker, finds herself one with the people in the world around her, from those patiently waiting to see the dentist to the natives who had been executed. You do not have to be a child to have this revelation, and the “I” in this poem does not simply reference Bishop in her childhood but represents the inner naivety and ignorance in us all. In the poem, the speaker describes her aunt as “a foolish, timid woman,” and even though her aunt is an adult, we see the equivalence between the speaker’s and her aunt’s shyness and also, the foolishness that is in not only the aunt and the speaker, but in us, the audience as well, which is elucidated in the next few lines, “I was my foolish aunt, / I—we—were falling, falling, our eyes glued to the cover / of the National Geographic” (Bishop 49-52). Bishop questions how humans are able to hurt one another and how we are able to live amidst the violence of our world, so clearly displayed in our media, making us as foolish as a six-year-old girl. We notice the poem is comprised of stanzas that grow ever shorter, especially after the speaker asks the fateful question of “What similarities…made us all just one?” (Bishop 77, 83) There is no answer, the spaces between the last three stanzas reflecting the lack of words to say. It is our irrational rejection of humans unlike us, whether by where they live, what their skin color is, or by what language they speak. Bishop’s message is fundamentally the opposite of Plath’s. Humanity should work in harmony instead of continually battling over differences that we ascribe unnecessary value to. Alas, that dream is not to be realized as the poem ends with, “Then I was back in it. / The War was on” (Bishop 94-95), referencing World War I, one of the two most global wars of them all that continued as the speaker and everyone else sat complicit in that waiting room.
Both Plath and Bishop, in their poems “Lady Lazarus” and “In the Waiting Room” respectively, utilize the lyric I and their own experiences to convey the relationships they see between the individual and society. Through the use of different poetic techniques and styles, they construct a characterization of “I” and “them,” but they each construct diametric interpretations of the relationship between these two groups. Plath’s “Lady Lazarus” give us an impression that it is “I” against “them,” that whether it is Plath versus her family, the woman against the patriarchal system, or the poet against consumerism, it is every person for themselves, and each of us must rise up to fight for our lives. Her poem, “Daddy,” conveys much of the same message, focusing more on Plath’s tumultuous relationship with her father and her ex-husband. Bishop’s “In the Waiting Room” uses careful wording to set a scene that implies that it is not “I,” but “we,” though that is a utopia that has not yet, if ever, been realized in the violent society we live in today. Through exploration of each poet’s past and their style of poetry, we are able to glimpse into their minds and see their criticisms of society’s treatment of the individual.
Works Cited
Bishop, Elizabeth. “In the Waiting Room.” Poets.org, Academy of American Poets, 26 Feb. 2015, www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/waiting-room.
Plath, Sylvia. “Lady Lazarus.” Poets.org, Academy of American Poets, 23 July 2014, www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/lady-lazarus.