Year 12 IB Extended Essays 2017

lack of identity and context excites her, revealing her insecure and delicate mental state. The

speaker detests the flowers, complaining that “they hurt [her]” in stanza 6 and “eat [her]

oxygen” on line 49, essentially killing her, as if they are the source of her depression, which is

killing her. The poem reveals the essence of her relationship with Ted Hughes and the rejection

and repulsiveness she experiences.

Plath’s second poem, Lady Lazarus 2 (1962), is a complicated, brutal, and bitter dramatic

monologue that leads the reader to imagine the speaker to be Sylvia Plath. The poem uses the

autobiographical information and context of Plath’s life, but in an extreme and exaggerated

way portrayed through the narrator. The poem is a cry of anger and frustration, revealing

Plath’s unhealthy obsession with suicide, creatively providing the readers, with two opposing

perspectives of Plath’s life. On the one hand, the poem directly highlights Plath’s fragile mental

state, causing her to take extreme measures to end it. However, the poem also shows Plath’s

obsession with pattern, and how everything that happened in her life, happened for a reason in

a destined way. The poem is structured into 3 line stanzas, with a total of 28 stanzas. The tercets

are blunt, and short with chopped lines, creating an energetic and enticing ‘read’ which captures

the whole essence of Plath’s inner psyche that everything is moving at an uncontrollable rapid

pace. The repetition of the three line stanza is a subtle note to Plath’s pattern in suicide attempts

with two near-death experiences, one being a suicide attempt and one being an accident , and

the three repetitions allude to a near third attempt, which went on to be successful. Lady

Lazarus 2 was written four months prior to her ‘successful’ attempt.

The title prepares the reader for the theme of death, referring to Lazarus from the Bible, whom

Jesus raised from the dead (Trever, 2017). The speaker has altered the character taken from the

Bible to Lady Lazarus 2 , as if for it to mirror Plath herself, a metaphor for her coming back to