American Poets Walter Whitman and Sylvia Plath

Walt Whitman is an American poet, essayist, and journalist born in West Hills, New York in 1819. His poem "Reconciliation," has a very unique historical background. Whitman volunteered during the American Civil War in hospitals in Washington, D.C. Using his profound literary talent and education, Whitman often helped injured soldiers write letters to their families while also helping nurse them back to health. However, more often than not Whitman watched as the soldiers succumbed to their injuries and died. Whitman knew that a national reconciliation was going to be necessary and even vital after the war. His poem expresses his understanding of this need as well as the painful truth that we are all not that different than our enemies, “For my enemy is dead — a man divine as myself is dead”.

Sylvia Plath is an American poet, novelist, and short-story writer born in Boston, MA in 1932. Plath is well-known for having a confessional style and incorporating her own troubles and depression into her work. The same is very true for “Lady Lazarus”. The poem has both very strong historical and socio-cultural influences. “Lady Lazarus” is about a woman who struggles to cope with the societal pressures placed on women. In the poem, Lady Lazarus talks about how she keeps dying while society watches her and yet she keeps coming back to life and no one does anything to help her. What’s chilling about this poem is that Lady Lazarus is a direct representation of Sylvia Plath herself. Sylvia Plath is Lady Lazarus. Since “Lady Lazarus” was written in October of 1962 and Sylvia Plath committed suicide in February of 1963, the poem is viewed as one of Sylvia Plath’s final cries for help.

"Lady Lazarus"

BY SYLVIA PLATH

I have done it again.

One year in every ten

I manage it——

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

O my enemy.

Do I terrify?——

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?

The sour breath

Will vanish in a day.

Soon, soon the flesh

The grave cave ate will be

At home on me

And I a smiling woman.

I am only thirty.

And like the cat I have nine times to die.

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,

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.

The first time it happened I was ten.

It was an accident.

The second time I meant

To last it out and not come back at all.

I rocked shut

As a seashell.

They had to call and call

And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

Dying

Is an art, like everything else.

I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.

I do it so it feels real.

I guess you could say I’ve a call.

It’s easy enough to do it in a cell.

It’s easy enough to do it and stay put.

It’s the theatrical

Comeback in broad day

To the same place, the same face, the same brute

Amused shout:

‘A miracle!’

That knocks me out.

There is a charge

For the eyeing of my scars,

there is a charge

For the hearing of my heart——

It really goes. And there is a charge,

a very large charge

For a word or a touch

Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.

So, so, Herr Doktor.

So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus,

I am your valuable, The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek.

I turn and burn.

Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

Ash, ash— You poke and stir.

Flesh, bone, there is nothing there——

A cake of soap, A wedding ring, A gold filling.

Herr God,

Herr Lucifer

Beware Beware.

Out of the ash

I rise with my red hair

And I eat men like air.

"Reconcliation"

By Walter Whitman

WORD over all, beautiful as the sky!

Beautiful that war, and all its deeds of carnage, must in time be utterly lost;

That the hands of the sisters Death and Night, incessantly softly wash again, and ever again, this soil’d world:

... For my enemy is dead—a man divine as myself is dead;

I look where he lies, white-faced and still, in the coffin—I draw near;

I bend down, and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.

Works Cited

"Walt Whitman Biography." Bio.com. A&E Networks Television. Web. 24 Oct. 2015.

"Sylvia Plath Biography." Bio.com. A&E Networks Television. Web. 24 Oct. 2015.