Similarities Between Lady Lazarus And Daddy

The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, is the massacre of over six million Jews by Adolf Hitler. Hitler was the leader of Nazi Germany during World War II, which lasted from 1933 to 1945. The poems “ Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus” were both written around 1962, when the Holocaust was still ripe in people’s minds. The people back then possessed very strong feelings of hatred towards Nazis and greatly sympathized the Jews for what they went through during this time. In Sylvia Plath’s poems “Lady Lazarus” and “Daddy,” she uses symbols and metaphors about the Nazis and the Jews to convey the feelings of the speaker to the reader. Although both poems use first person, there are many differences between the two poems.

In both poems, the speaker is portrayed to the audience as a victim and their enemy is evil, or is seen as someone easily dislikable by the readers. In “ Daddy” the speaker said, “I have always been scared of you” (Line 41). This makes the audience feel like the speaker’s dad is bad or did something to terrify her, making him prone to be disliked. Also, the speakers reference the Holocaust throughout their poems. For example,

As for both of them something significant happens that will change their lives. In “Daddy” the speaker buried her father at the age of ten, while in “Lady Lazarus” she died for the first time. For the speaker in “Daddy” she does not let go of her father. Even after he dies she lets him rule her life. The narrator of “Lady Lazarus” feels that dying is an art after she accidentally almost kills herself at the age of ten. She will attempt to kill herself every ten years after this, so it is safe to say it have an influence on her life. The poems being written in first person gives the reader an insight into the speaker’s mind and their thought process. This helps the audience understand what the narrators are feeling and why they do what they