Kweku Ngissah

Body Parts: Life and Death for Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath’s poems are full of imagery, many that have are used multiple times throughout several poems. One of the more important images she uses is body parts. This image has been very important in shaping public views of Plath and her poetry. This essay will analyze the use of body poetry in Plath’s poems “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus” in relation to life and death.
Death is a theme used in many of Plath’s most famous poems. In “Lady Lazarus” Plath used the images of many different body parts to further exemplify her theme of death, and her acceptance of it. One set of lines in particular struck with me. “Soon, soon the flesh/ The grave cave ate will be/ At home on me/ And I a smiling woman.”(Lady 16-19). This set of lines evokes the picture of a dead body, lain in the middle of a cave, rotting. And yet to this image, the narrator smiles and is happy. This initially seems to be Plath’s method of speaking of death and her happiness at its occurrence. That said, in the passage in the Bible that speaks of Lazarus, he is in the grave cave, his flesh rotting, when he is brought back to life. Thus this could change from a passage about death to that of life. In the poem “Daddy” body parts are used in relation to death usually to talk about her father, and how much it has affected Plath. In the first stanza of the poem, Plath states “black shoe/ In which I have lived like a foot/ For thirty years” (Daddy 2-4). The blacks shoes that the narrator speaks of are those that one may wear to a funeral, and these shoes have replaced the narrator’s feet. This shows just how important the death of her father has been in her life, because Plath is still wearing the shoes and living in them. By using the body part of a foot to describe it gives the shoe even further importance because we stand on our feet and without are feet, we are severely handicapped in many daily activities, as the death of her father severely handicapped Plath mentally. This is further exemplified in the statement “Ghastly statue with one gray toe/ Big as a Frisco seal” (Daddy 9-10). Statues are generally created as landmarks of important or influential people or things, and to create a statue of her father would mean that he is an influential figure to Plath. This statue is marred by its gray toe. Before Plath’s father died of gangrene, his toe turned gray. This symbolizes the image Plath has in her mind of her father, however the gray toe also shows her unconscious acceptance of the fact that he is imperfect and dead.
Despite these themes of death, the poems Lady Lazarus and Daddy also have themes relating to life. In Lady Lazarus, the image of body parts in used to exemplify the narrator’s health. For example “The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth? /The sour breath/Will vanish in a day.” (Lady 13-15). This line follows a section of the poem describing Jew who is a walking miracle because they are still alive. These lines further the idea of this Jew having survived and further state that in a day, she will be healthy and her “sour breath will vanish.” This Jew, who was presumed to be death, has come back alive and will be back to normal within a day. This is similar to the passage in the Bible about Lazarus, and how he brought back to life, not necessarily by his own will, just as this narrator has been brought to life and back to health. In “Daddy,” body parts are also used to connote the narrator being brought back to life against her will: “But they pulled me out of the sack,/ And they stuck me together with glue.” Although does not directly state any specific body parts, the image it evokes, is that of a broken body, glued back together haphazardly, and very distraught. That said, it is back together and alive again. In this passage, and in that of “Lady Lazarus”, the narrator is taken and put together without their own consent, and in “Daddy”, the narrator makes it obvious that she would rather not have been brought back.
In Sylvia Plath’s poems “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus,” the image of body parts is used to further the themes of life and death and evoke images that better embody Sylvia Plath’s ideas and feelings of death, and being saved from her suicide attempts.

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