The lowest "charges" are just for looking at her the largest ones are for an actual piece of her (her blood, her hair). The items that she's "charging" for get increasingly more personal.They have to pay to hear her heart beat, and they have to pay a whole lot of money to hear her speak, to touch her, or to take a bit of her blood, hair, or clothes. If people want to see her scars, they have to pay. As Lady L says, "there is a charge." That means people have to drop some dough to see the spectacle she puts on.She says that this "knocks her out." Usually this phrase is a metaphor for being surprised or amazed, but in this moment in the poem, it takes on a violent undertone, as if she's in a boxing match. Someone-a brute-shouts that she's a "miracle." Well, we heard that before, way back in stanza 2.She represents her resurrection-her coming back to life-as a circus act. Now we are back in the realm of the circus or carnival Lady Lazarus tells us that she's making a theatrical comeback.To the same place, the same face, the same bruteįor the eyeing of my scars, there is a chargeĪnd there is a charge, a very large charge Of course, part of the wonderfulness of the poem is its grotesqueness, but in moments like these, it's hard to forget that behind these lines is probably severe mental illness. We can now be sure that we're listening to the thoughts of an extremely depressed and disturbed person.It's a strange way of thinking about death, that's for sure, but we wouldn't put it past ol' Sylvia. Perhaps she's using suicide to express her control over her life. But here, Lady Lazarus is taking control over her own death. Usually, death is something that happens to us it's not something that we have control over or choose to do.And she tells us that she does "it" (again, that mysterious "it") so that it "feels like hell" and "feels real." Or, in other words, she comes close to death-or, to be more explicit, she attempts suicide-so that she can feel something.This is a lady who knows how to be forceful when she needs to be (which is apparently right now).We almost feel like Lady Lazarus is taunting us-like she's daring at us to challenge her. The beginning of the lines repeat each other (this is called anaphora) and have similar word choice (also known as diction), which means they have the same rhythm.We have the rhymes of "well" and "hell" and all of the slant rhymes of "real," "call," and "cell." The poem doesn't have a strict meter, but in this moment, patterns emerge. Things start getting really rhythmic here.So, dying isn't necessarily the art she does well-it's coming back from being almost dead she's a rock star at.If she's come close, but not quite made it to death three times, she's actually quite awful at the art of dying. And our speaker says she's an artistic genius at dying-she does it very well.
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