Creative
By Mitch Hamburger, Kate Barlock,
and Laura Eckman
Early Life
• Born October 27, 1932
• Father died when she was eight
• Went to Smith College on scholarship
– Top of her high school and college class
Later life
• Married Ted Hughes and had
two children
• 3 verified suicide attempts
• Ted and Sylvia were separated
• Plath committed suicide
shortly after
• Died of Carbon Monoxide
poisoning at age 30 with her
children sleeping in the other
room
The Beast
He was the bullman earlierm
King of the dish, my lucky animal.
Breathing was easy in his airy holding.
The sun sat in his armpit.
Nothing went moldy. The little invisibles
Waited on him hand and foot.
The blue sisters sent me to another school.
Monkey lived under the dunce cap.
He kept blowing me kisses.
I hardly knew him.
He won't be got rid of:
Memblepaws, teary and sorry,
Fido Littlesoul, the bowel's unfamiliar.
A dustbin's enough for him.
The dark's his bone.
Call him any name, he'll come to it.
Mud-sump, happy sty face.
I've married a cupboard of rubbish.
I bed in a fish puddle.
Down here the sky is always falling.
Hogwallow's at the window.
The star bugs won't save me this mouth.
I housekeep in Time's gut-end
Among emmets and mollusks,
Duchess of Nothing,
Hairtusk's bride.
Common Literary Devices
• Free Verse
• Allusions
– The Holocaust/World War II
– Roman and Greek Mythology
• Similes
• Metaphors
Common Topics
• Anger
• Death
• Destruction
• Alienation
• Often
Autobiographical
I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it----
Lady Lazarus
A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot
A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine
Jew linen.
Peel off the napkin
0 my enemy.
Do I terrify?----
This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.
What a million filaments.
The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see
Them unwrap me hand and foot
The big strip tease.
Gentlemen, ladies
These are my hands
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,
The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The sour breath
The first time it happened I was ten.
Will vanish in a day.
It was an accident.
Soon, soon the flesh
The second time I meant
The grave cave ate will be
To last it out and not come back at all.
At home on me
I rocked shut
And I a smiling woman.
As a seashell.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die. They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.
Lady Lazarus (cont.)
Dying
Is an art, like everything else,
I do it exceptionally well.
Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.
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 am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby
It's easy enough to do it in a cell.
It's easy enough to do it and stay put.
It's the theatrical
That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.
Comeback in broad day
Ash, ash --To the same place, the same face, the same brute You poke and stir.
Amused shout:
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there---'A miracle!'
That knocks me out.
There is a charge
A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.
For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart---It really goes.
Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.
And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood
Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.
Literary Criticism
• “Unrestrained, exceedingly personal free
verse, often about extreme emotional states”
• “Sense of common humanity”
• “intense focus”
• “Inescapability of violence”
• Extreme emotional aspects
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– “I was ten when they buried you. / At twenty I tried
to die / And get back, back, back to you. / I thought
even the bones would do.”
• Intensity
– “Not God but a swastika / So black no sky could
squeak through / Every woman adores a fascist /
The boot in the face, the brute / Brute heart of a
brute like you”
• Violence
– “There’s a steak in your fat black heart / And the
villagers never liked you. / They are dancing and
stamping on you.”
Quotes from “Daddy”
• Sense of humanity
– Contains very dark themes
– not extremely relatable
“But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look”
-“Daddy”
D
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“Is there no way out of the mind?”
-Sylvia Plath