Morphology

 Unit I: Morphology 

Meaning and definition

Morphology is commonly defined as the scientific study of the internal structure of words.  Words have phonological properties. Their forms often reflect their syntactic function and their parts are often composed of meaningful smaller pieces. This word is of Greek origin. The term ‘morph’ means form and morphology means the study of forms.  In linguistics, morphology refers to the mental system involved in word formation. Morphology looks at how individual words are formed from smaller chunks of meaningful units called morphemes. For example, the English word 'untied' is really made up of three parts, one referring to the process of reversing an action (un-), one indicating the action of twisting string like things together so they stay (tie), and the last indicating that the action happened in the past (-d).

 Morphology interacts in important ways with both phonology (bringing sounds together can cause them to change) and syntax, which needs to pay attention to the form of a word when it combines it with other words. Traditional linguistics treated words as the basic unit of grammatical theory. American Structuralists came up with the concept of morpheme and claimed that words are analyzable in terms of morphemes.

Morpheme

Morpheme is the smallest indivisible unit of semantic content and grammatical function they are not identical to a word. A single word can have one or more morpheme. Morphemes may or may not stand alone where as words stand alone. A morpheme can be defined as a minimal unit having more or less constant meaning and more or less constant form. For example, the word ‘buyers’ is made up of three morphemes {buy} +{er}+{s}. In the formation of multi morphemic words (Words that have more than one morpheme) it is not the case that the morphemes combine in arbitrary ways, but they follow a definite pattern. Linguists study the meaning of morphemes as well as the distribution and combinatory possibilities. A single morpheme can be found in a number of combinations. The more combinations a morpheme is found in, the more productive it is said to be. Morphemes are generally identified based on the following three criteria. Morphemes are words or parts of words that have meaning, they cannot be divided into smaller meaningful parts without violation of its meaning or without meaningless remainders and they recur in differing word environments with a relatively stable meaning.

Morpheme can have varying size one cannot judge whether something is a morpheme or not by relying only on the number of syllables or the length of the word for example ‘constituent’ a long word and a plural marker ‘-s’  qualify as a morpheme.

Types of Morphemes

Morphemes and immediately be divided into two: Free and bound morphemes. 

1. Free morphemes are those that can stand alone as words. E.g.: cat, boat, on, in, about and so on. 

2.  Bound Morphemes are those that can occur only in combination that is they are parts of the word. E.g. -s, -er, -ing, -ment. 

Bound morphemes are classified into affixes, critics, portmanteau morphemes and empty morphemes. 

(i) Affixes:  Affixes are bound morphemes attached to a word. They suggest where exactly they are attached to in the word.  Affixes participate in the word formation of a language.  They are always bound morphemes and do not belong to a lexical category. Based on the place of occurrence,  affixes are classified into four types

• Prefix: attached at the onset always. (re-start, un-happy,pre-view).

• Suffix: attached after  the root. ( quick-ly, dance-er, exam-ine).

Derivation and  Inflectional affixes: 

Derivational affixes are those bound morphemes that are added to  one word to create another word with the meaning and a category distinction which may be distinct from that of its base.  E.g. 

Verb to adjective: read- readable, verb to noun: write -writer, noun to  adjective: girl- girlish,  noun to verb: glory -glorify.

Inflectional affixes: are those bound morphemes whose presence in the structure is mandated by the structure of a sentence. Inflection creates new forms of the same word with the addition of grammatical properties. The basic meaning of the newly formed word would be the same. English inflectional morphology includes the following

• Nominal suffixes plurals: (dog+s),  possessives (dog’s)

• Adjectival suffix:  Comparative: (dark+er), superlative (dark+est)

• Verbal suffix: present third person singular (buy+s), past (walk+ed), progressive (read+ing). 

(ii) Portmanteau morphemes are those morphemes that carries more than one piece of meaning, but which cannot be broken down into separate morphemes.

 E.g. -s means singular, present and 3rd person, but these meanings cannot be separated.

(iii) Empty morphemes are those which have structure phone but no meaning example in the word Cran-berry, though Berry has meaning, cran  does not have a meaning of its own.  

(iv) Zero morpheme are morphemes that are physically not present in the word yet fulfill the requirement of the language. For example the word ‘cut’ has the same form in both past and present tense and past and is the null morphemes is added to the root,  thus it has a function but no form. 

(v) Clitics have grammatical rather than lexical meaning. They belong to closed classes like pronouns, preposition and conjunctions. Clitics are usually attached to the edges of the words, outside the derivational and inflectional affixes. 

E.g. contraction of the morpheme is, as in What’s going on? 

Allomorphs are the group of morphs that are the realization of the same morpheme i.e. just as allomorphs phones are the variants of a phoneme, so allomorphs are the variants of a morpheme. 

E.g. -I’d, -t, and -d are the allomorphs of past tense morpheme.

Allomorphs are in complimentary distribution. That is they have the same meaning and function but they do not occur in the same environment.

Words, lexeme and word forms- root, stem and base: Bloomfield defined words as minimal free units. The term word is often used in two different senses, as a physical unit and as a semantic entity. These physical entities, the written or spoken form of words are called word forms. In other words, word forms are the physical realization of lexemes. The include all the inflected forms of a lexeme. For example, ‘sit’, ‘sat’ and ‘sitting’ are different forms of the word ‘sit’. 

Lexeme is the term used to denote the usage of word to refer the semantic entity. It is normally defined as the vocabulary items listed in a dictionary. A lexeme includes all inflected forms of a word. Example SIT- ‘sit’, ‘sat’ and ‘sitting’, ‘sit’; WALK- ‘walking’, ‘walks’, ‘walked’, ‘walk’.

Root, stem and base.

 Roots are primary lexical units, which carry the most significant aspect of semantic content. They cannot be reduces into smaller units. They are lexical morpheme, the base to which grammatical derivational morphemes are added to form a complex word. Words have multiple rrots. Some lexemes have more than one root. A root also qualifies as a stem. 

All roots can be base, but not all bases are roots. 

Eg. ‘walk is the root of the form - ‘walks’, ‘walked’, ‘walking’, ‘walker’ and so on.

Stem is the part of word that is in existence before any inflectional affix.  Eg, in the word books, the stem is book (which is also the root”, it immediately precedes the inflectional morpheme –s. the word friendship is the base word for friendships, but is not the root. Bases can be called stems in inflectional morphology. 

Base is any form, which enters into a word formation process that yields a more complex form. The affixes attached to the base may be inflectional or derivational. A root like girl can be a base to ‘girls’. The base of the word playfulness is playful as it is the immediate form that enters into the process of word formation. 

 Explain the process of word formation giving suitable examples.

1. Compounding: When two or more words are joined to make a new word the process is known as compound as formation.

Example- Manpower (Compound Noun)

                Myself (Compound Pronoun)

2. Clipping: The process by which a word is curtailed by retaining only its initial and recognizable part without effecting any change in meaning and grammatical class is called clipping.

Ex. - Perambulator – Pram

         Telephone – Phone 

3. Blending: When a new word is formed by combining the meaning and also partly the sound of two words. 

Ex. - Brunch (blend of breakfast and lunch meaning a late meal between breakfast and lunch).

4. Backformation: Back formation is the formula of words by the deletion of actual or supposed affixes in longer words: 

Housekeeping            Housekeep

Service                        Serve

5. Coining: A new word is created either deliberately or accidentally without using the other word formation processes and often from seemingly nothing.

Ex.- Xerox, Google etc. 

6. Acronym: Pronounceable word coined from initial letters of the words in a name (mostly of an organization), title or phrase. 

Ex- TOEFL – Teaching of English as Foreign Language

       WHO- World Health Organization

7. Conversion: When a word of one grammatical class is used as a word of another class without change in its form the process is known as conversion. 

Ex- Service - That garage services my car. (Noun used as verb)

Eponym

8. Reduplication: Sometimes new words are formed in English by repeating an item with a little change which can take place initially, medially or finally.

 Example- Tip-top, Brain- drain 

9. Derivation: Example: Defrost etc.

Explain the Process of Word Formation. 

Process of Word Formation: There are processes by which new words are formed.

10. Derivation- Example: Defrost etc.

11. Compound Formation: When two or more words are joined to make a new word the process is known as compound as formation.

Example- Manpower (Compound Noun)

                Myself (Compound Pronoun)

12. Duplication- Sometimes new words are formed in English by repeating an item with a little change which can take place initially, medially or finally.

 Example- Tip-top, Brain- drain 

13. Back formation: Back formation is the formula of words by the deletion of actual or supposed affixes in longer words: 

Housekeeping            Housekeep

Service                        Serve

14. Conversion: When a word of one grammatical class is used as a word of another class without change in its form the process is known as conversion. 

Ex- Service - That garage services my car. (Noun used as verb)

15. Clipping: The process by which a word is curtailed by retaining only its initial and recognizable part without effecting any change in meaning and grammatical class is called clipping.

Ex. - Perambulator – Pram

         Telephone – Phone 

16. Acronym: Pronounceable word coined from initial letters of the words in a name (mostly of an organization), title or phrase. 

Ex- TOEFL – Teaching of English as Foreign Language

       WHO- World Health Organization

17. Blending: When a new word is formed by combining the meaning and also partly the sound of two words. 

Ex. - Brunch (blend of breakfast and lunch meaning a late meal between breakfast and lunch).

18. Coinage- A new word is created either deliberately or accidentally without using the other word formation processes and often from seemingly nothing.

Ex.- Xerox, Google etc. 

Intonation

  Intonation

Vibrating glottis provides voiced and voiceless distinction. It has another important role to play in continuous speech, I.e. it provides pitch  fluctuation. By pitch fluctuation we mean that the pitch of the voice is continually in the process of  this in the process of either falling or rising. While we are talking in fact it never remains constant for more than a fraction of the second. Pitch fluctuation is found in the speech of all communities. It is not a random fluctuation but follows well-defined melodic patterns which are meaningful.

The pitch of the voice is determined by the frequency of the vibration of the vocal chords that is the number of times they open and close in a second. The pattern of variation of the pitch of the voice (that is fall or the rise) constitutes the intonation of a language.

If you say ‘Put it down’ the pitch of your voice will move from a high level through a low-level this is called the falling tone.

The falling tune is sometimes referred to as the glide –down. It consists of a fall in the pitch of the voice from a high level to a low level. It is marked[   ]. The falling tune is normally used in 

Ordinary statements:  It was quite   good.

Wh questions: Who are you   talking to?

Command: Take it a way.

Exclamations:     Splendid!

Question Tags: It was a good film .Wasn’t  it?

Rhetorical questions: Wasn’t that a  difficult exam?

The Rising Tune is sometimes referred to as glide up. It consists of glide in the pitch from low to high level. It is marked [    ]

The rising tune is normally used in 

Polite requests: Go and open the    window.

Expected responses:    Thank you.

Alternative questions: Do you like   tea or  coffee or   coke.

Enumeration :   One,  two,  three,   four ,  five.

Greetings, apologies, partings: He   llo, I’m so sorry, Good   bye, 

The falling-rising tune is sometimes referred to as the dive. It consists of a fall from high to low and then a rise to the middle of the voice. The tune can be used either on one syllable or different syllablesof a word or sentence. It can be illustrated thus:   Seventy,   That was  nice. 

For correcting and warning (he’s forty-five.) Forty   six,  

Please be     careful, You’ll be    late

These tunes are called kinetic tunes, i.e. there is a pitch change on a particular tune. If a syllable is said on a level pitch, it is said to be static one.

Practicl exercise on Intonation 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6aE4nceJt8

The Old Man and the Sea

 

The Old Man and the Sea

The Old Man and the Sea is the story of an epic struggle between an old, seasoned fisherman and the greatest catch of his life. It is the tale as a chronicle of man’s battle against the natural world, but the novella is, more accurately, the story of man’s place within nature. For eighty-four days, Santiago, an aged Cuban fisherman, has set out to sea and returned empty-handed. So conspicuously unlucky is he that the parents of his young, devoted apprentice and friend, Manolin, have forced the boy to leave the old man in order to fish in a more prosperous boat. Nevertheless, the boy continues to care for the old man upon his return each night. He helps the old man tote his gear to his ramshackle hut, secures food for him, and discusses the latest developments in American baseball, especially the trials of the old man’s hero, Joe DiMaggio. Santiago is confident that his unproductive streak will soon come to an end, and he resolves to sail out farther than usual the following day.

On the eighty-fifth day of his unlucky streak, Santiago does as promised, sailing his skiff far beyond the island’s shallow coastal waters and venturing into the Gulf Stream. He prepares his lines and drops them. At noon, a big fish, which he knows is a marlin, takes the bait that Santiago has placed one hundred fathoms deep in the waters. The old man expertly hooks the fish, but he cannot pull it in. Instead, the fish begins to pull the boat.

Unable to tie the line fast to the boat for fear the fish would snap a taut line, the old man bears the strain of the line with his shoulders, back, and hands, ready to give slack should the marlin make a run. The fish pulls the boat all through the day, through the night, through another day, and through another night. It swims steadily northwest until at last it tires and swims east with the current. The entire time, Santiago endures constant pain from the fishing line. Whenever the fish lunges, leaps, or makes a dash for freedom, the cord cuts Santiago badly. Although wounded and weary, the old man feels a deep empathy and admiration for the marlin, his brother in suffering, strength, and resolve.

On the third day the fish tires, and Santiago, sleep-deprived, aching, and nearly delirious, manages to pull the marlin in close enough to kill it with a harpoon thrust. Dead beside the skiff, the marlin is the largest Santiago has ever seen. He lashes it to his boat, raises the small mast, and sets sail for home. While Santiago is excited by the price that the marlin will bring at market, he is more concerned that the people who will eat the fish are unworthy of its greatness.

As Santiago sails on with the fish, the marlin’s blood leaves a trail in the water and attracts sharks. The first to attack is a great mako shark, which Santiago manages to slay with the harpoon. In the struggle, the old man loses the harpoon and lengths of valuable rope, which leaves him vulnerable to other shark attacks. The old man fights off the successive vicious predators as best he can, stabbing at them with a crude spear he makes by lashing a knife to an oar, and even clubbing them with the boat’s tiller. Although he kills several sharks, more and more appear, and by the time night falls, Santiago’s continued fight against the scavengers is useless. They devour the marlin’s precious meat, leaving only skeleton, head, and tail. Santiago chastises himself for going “out too far,” and for sacrificing his great and worthy opponent. He arrives home before daybreak, stumbles back to his shack, and sleeps very deeply.

The next morning, a crowd of amazed fishermen gathers around the skeletal carcass of the fish, which is still lashed to the boat. Knowing nothing of the old man’s struggle, tourists at a nearby café observe the remains of the giant marlin and mistake it for a shark. Manolin, who has been worried sick over the old man’s absence, is moved to tears when he finds Santiago safe in his bed. The boy fetches the old man some coffee and the daily papers with the baseball scores, and watches him sleep. When the old man wakes, the two agree to fish as partners once more. The old man returns to sleep and dreams his usual dream of lions at play on the beaches of Africa. The old man feels very unwell and also coughs up blood a few times towards the end of the story

Santiago

From the very first paragraph, Santiago is characterized as someone struggling against defeat. He has gone eighty-four days without catching a fish. Almost as a reminder of Santiago’s struggle, the sail of his skiff resembles “the flag of permanent defeat.” But the old man refuses defeat at every turn: he resolves to sail out beyond the other fishermen to where the biggest fish promise to be. He lands the marlin, tying his record of eighty-seven days after a brutal three-day fight, and he continues to ward off sharks from stealing his prey, even though he knows the battle is useless.

Because Santiago is pitted against the creatures of the sea, the tale becomes as a chronicle of man’s battle against the natural world, but the novella is, more accurately, the story of man’s place within nature. Both Santiago and the marlin display qualities of pride, honor, and bravery, and both are subject to the same eternal law: they must kill or be killed. As Santiago reflects when he watches the weary warbler fly toward shore, where it will inevitably meet the hawk, the world is filled with predators, and no living thing can escape the inevitable struggle that will lead to its death. Santiago lives according to his own observation: “man is not made for defeat . . . [a] man can be destroyed but not defeated.” In Hemingway’s portrait of the world, death is inevitable, but the best men (and animals) will nonetheless refuse to give in to its power. Accordingly, man and fish will struggle to the death, just as hungry sharks will lay waste to an old man’s trophy catch.

The novel suggests that it is possible to transcend this natural law. It is precisely through the effort to battle the inevitable that a man can prove himself. Indeed, a man can prove this determination over and over through the worthiness of the opponents he chooses to face. Santiago finds the marlin worthy of a fight. His admiration for these opponents brings love and respect into an equation with death, as their destruction becomes a point of honor and bravery that confirms Santiago’s heroic qualities. Santiago, though destroyed at the end of the novella, is never defeated. Instead, he emerges as a hero. Santiago’s struggle does not enable him to change man’s place in the world. Rather, it enables him to meet his most dignified destiny.

Many parallels exist between Santiago and the classic heroes of the ancient world. In addition to exhibiting terrific strength, bravery, and moral certainty, those heroes usually possess a tragic flaw—a quality that, though admirable, leads to their eventual downfall. If pride is Santiago’s fatal flaw, he is keenly aware of it. After sharks have destroyed the marlin, the old man apologizes again and again to his worthy opponent. He has ruined them both, he concedes, by sailing beyond the usual boundaries of fishermen. Indeed, his last word on the subject comes when he asks himself the reason for his undoing and decides, “Nothing . . . I went out too far.”

While it is certainly true that Santiago’s eighty-four-day run of bad luck is an affront to his pride as a masterful fisherman, and that his attempt to bear out his skills by sailing far into the gulf waters leads to disaster, Hemingway does not condemn his protagonist for being full of pride. On the contrary, Santiago stands as proof that pride motivates men to greatness. Because the old man acknowledges that he killed the mighty marlin largely out of pride, and because his capture of the marlin leads in turn to his heroic transcendence of defeat, pride becomes the source of Santiago’s greatest strength. Without a ferocious sense of pride, that battle would never have been fought, or more likely, it would have been abandoned before the end.

Santiago’s pride also motivates his desire to transcend the destructive forces of nature. Throughout the novel, no matter how baleful his circumstances become, the old man exhibits an unflagging determination to catch the marlin and bring it to shore. When the first shark arrives, Santiago’s resolve is mentioned twice in the space of just a few paragraphs. First we are told that the old man “was full of resolution but he had little hope.” Then, sentences later, the narrator says, “He hit [the shark] without hope but with resolution.” The old man meets every challenge with the same unwavering determination: he is willing to die in order to bring in the marlin, and he is willing to die in order to battle the feeding sharks. It is this conscious decision to act, to fight, to never give up that enables Santiago to avoid defeat. Although he returns to Havana without the trophy of his long battle, he returns with the knowledge that he has acquitted himself proudly and manfully. Hemingway seems to suggest that victory is not a prerequisite for honor. Instead, glory depends upon one having the pride to see a struggle through to its end, regardless of the outcome. Even if the old man had returned with the marlin intact, his moment of glory, like the marlin’s meat, would have been short-lived. The glory and honor Santiago accrues comes not from his battle itself but from his pride and determination to fight.

In order to suggest the profundity of the old man’s sacrifice and the glory that derives from it, Hemingway purposefully likens Santiago to Christ, who, according to Christian theology, gave his life for the greater glory of humankind. Crucifixion imagery is the most noticeable way in which Hemingway creates the symbolic parallel between Santiago and Christ. When Santiago’s palms are first cut by his fishing line, the reader cannot help but think of Christ suffering his stigmata. Later, when the sharks arrive, Hemingway portrays the old man as a crucified martyr, saying that he makes a noise similar to that of a man having nails driven through his hands. Furthermore, the image of the old man struggling up the hill with his mast across his shoulders recalls Christ’s march toward Calvary. Even the position in which Santiago collapses on his bed, face down with his arms out straight and the palms of his hands up—brings to mind the image of Christ suffering on the cross. Hemingway employs these images in the final pages of the novella in order to link Santiago to Christ, who exemplified transcendence by turning loss into gain, defeat into triumph, and even death into renewed life.

Death is the unavoidable force in the novella, the one fact that no living creature can escape. But death, Hemingway suggests, is never an end in itself: in death there is always the possibility of the most vigorous life. The reader notes that as Santiago slays the marlin, not only is the old man reinvigorated by the battle, but the fish also comes alive “with his death in him.” Life, the possibility of renewal, necessarily follows on the heels of death.

Whereas the marlin’s death hints at a type of physical reanimation, death leads to life in less literal ways at other points in the novella. The book’s crucifixion imagery emphasizes the cyclical connection between life and death, as does Santiago’s battle with the marlin. His success at bringing the marlin in earns him the awed respect of the fishermen who once mocked him, and secures him the companionship of Manolin, the apprentice who will carry on Santiago’s teachings long after the old man has died.

Santiago dreams his pleasant dream of the lions at play on the beaches of Africa three times. The first time is the night before he departs on his three-day fishing expedition, the second occurs when he sleeps on the boat for a few hours in the middle of his struggle with the marlin, and the third takes place at the very end of the book. In fact, the sober promise of the triumph and regeneration with which the novella closes is supported by the final image of the lions. Because Santiago associates the lions with his youth, the dream suggests the circular nature of life. Additionally, because Santiago imagines the lions, fierce predators, playing, his dream suggests a harmony between the opposing forces—life and death, love and hate, destruction and regeneration—of nature.

Magnificent and glorious, the marlin symbolizes the ideal opponent. In a world in which “everything kills everything else in some way,” Santiago feels genuinely lucky to find himself matched against a creature that brings out the best in him: his strength, courage, love, and respect.

The shovel-nosed sharks are little more than moving appetites that thoughtlessly and gracelessly attack the marlin. As opponents of the old man, they stand in bold contrast to the marlin, which is worthy of Santiago’s effort and strength. They symbolize and embody the destructive laws of the universe and attest to the fact that those laws can be transcended only when equals fight to the death. Because they are base predators, Santiago wins no glory from battling them.

 

Lady Lazarus by Sylvia Plath

The title is an allusion to the Biblical character, Lazarus, whom Jesus raised from the dead.

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.  (hang about, linger on) 

It’s the theatrical (dramatic, melodramatic)

 

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, (composition, ouvre, work, piece)

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.

Sylvia Plath, “Lady Lazarus” from Collected Poems. Copyright © 1960, 1965, 1971, 1981 by the Estate of Sylvia Plath. Editorial matter copyright © 1981 by Ted Hughes. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Source: Collected Poems (HarperCollins Publishers Inc, 1992)

"Lady Lazarus" Summary "Lady Lazarus" is a poem commonly understood to be about suicide. It is narrated by a woman, and mostly addressed to an unspecified person. The narrator begins by saying she has "done it again." Every ten years, she manages to commit this unnamed act. She considers herself a walking miracle with bright skin, her right foot a "paperweight," and her face as fine and featureless as a "Jew linen". She addresses an unspecified enemy, asking him to peel the napkin from her face, and inquiring whether he is terrified by the features he sees there. She assures him that her "sour breath" will vanish in a day.

She is certain that her flesh will soon be restored to her face after having been sacrificed to the grave, and that she will then be a smiling, 30 year-old woman. She will ultimately be able to die nine times, like a cat, and has just completed her third death. She will die once each decade. After each death, a "peanut-crunching crowd" shoves in to see her body unwrapped. She addresses the crowd directly, showing them she remains skin and bone, unchanged from who she was before. The first death occurred when she was ten, accidentally. The second death was intentional - she did not mean to return from it. Instead, she was as "shut as a seashell" until she was called back by people who then picked the worms off her corpse. She does not specifically identify how either death occurred.

She believes that "Dying / Is an art, like everything else," and that she does it very well. Each time, "it feels real," and is easy for her. What is difficult is the dramatic comeback, the return to the same place and body, occurring as it does in broad daylight before a crowd's cry of "A miracle!" She believes people should pay to view her scars, hear her heart, or receive a word, touch, blood, hair or clothes from her. In the final stanzas, she addresses the listener as "Herr Dockter" and "Herr Enemy," sneering that she is his crowning achievement, a "pure gold baby." She does not underestimate his concern, but is bothered by how he picks through her ashes. She insists there is nothing there but soap, a wedding ring, and a gold filling. She warns "Herr God, Herr Lucifer" to beware of her because she is going to rise out of the ash and "eat men like air."

Analysis "Lady Lazarus" is a complicated, dark, and brutal poem originally published in the collection Ariel. Plath composed the poem during her most productive and fecund (rich, productive) creative period. It is considered one of Plath's best poems, and has been subject to a plethora (excess) of literary criticism since its publication. It is commonly interpreted as an expression of Plath's suicidal attempts and impulses. Its tone veers between menacing (threatening) and scathing, and it has drawn attention for its use of Holocaust imagery, similar to "Daddy." The title is an allusion to the Biblical character, Lazarus, whom Jesus raised from the dead.

The standard interpretation of the poem suggests that it is about multiple suicide attempts. The details can certainly be understood in this framework. When the speaker says she "has done it again," she means she has attempted suicide for the third time, after one accidental attempt and one deliberate attempt in the past. Each attempt occurred in a different decade, and she is now 30 years old. Now that she has been pulled back to life from this most recent attempt, her "sour breath / Will vanish in a day," and her flesh will return to her bones. However, this recovery is presented as a failure, whereas the suicide attempts are presented as accomplishments - "Dying is an art" that she performs "exceptionally well." She seems to believe she will reach a perfection through escaping her body.

By describing dying as an art, she includes a spectator to both her deaths and resurrections. (concept of coming back to life after death) Because the death is a performance, it necessarily requires others. In large part, she kills herself to punish them for driving her to it. The eager "peanut-crunching crowd" is invited but criticized for its voyeuristic impulse. The crowd could certainly be understood to include the reader himself, since he reads the poem to explore her dark impulses. She assumes that her voyeurs are significantly invested - they would pay the "large charge" to see her scars and heart.

However, she imbues( influences) this impulse with a harsh criticism by comparing the crowd to the complacent Germans who stood aside while the Jews were thrown into concentration camps. Further, the crowd ultimately proves less an encouragement than a burden when they also attend the resurrection. She despises this second part of the process, and resents the presence of others at that time. Whether this creates a vicious circle, in which that resentment is partially responsible for the subsequent attempt, is implied but not explicitly stated. Critic Robert Bagg explores the speaker's contradictory feelings towards the crowd by writing that Plath "is not bound by any metaphysical belief in the self's limitations. Instead of resisting the self's antagonists she derives a tremendous thrill from throwing her imagination into the act of self-obliteration.(removal of parts as a result of disease or surgery."She can destroy her body, but her imaginative self remains a performer, always aware of the effect she has on others.

The poem can also be understood through a feminist lens, as a demonstration of the female artist's struggle for autonomy in a patriarchal society. Lynda K. Bundtzen writes that "the female creation of a male-artist god is asserting independent creative powers." From this perspective, "Lady Lazarus" is not merely a confessional poem detailing depressive feelings, but is also a statement on how the powerful male figure usurps Plath's creative powers but is defeated by her rebirth. Though Lady Lazarus knows that "Herr Doktor" will claim possession of her body and remains after forcing her suicide, she equally believes she will rise and "eat men like air." Her creative powers can be stifled momentarily, but will always return stronger.

The poem can also be understood in a larger context, as a comment on the relationship between poet and audience in a society that, as Pamela Annas claims, has separated creativity and consumption. The crowd views Lady Lazarus/the poet/Plath as an object, and therefore does not recognize her as a human being. Plath reflects this through her multiple references to body parts separated from the whole. From this interpretation, Lady Lazarus's suicide then becomes "an assertion of wholeness, an act of self-definition, and a last desperate act of contempt toward the peanut-crunching crowd." The only way she can keep herself intact is to destroy herself, and she does this rather than be turned into commodities. Though "Herr Docktor" will peruse her remains for commodities, she will not have been defeated because of her final act.

As has often been the case in Plath's poems, the Holocaust imagery has drawn much attention from critics and readers. It is quite profuse in this poem. Lady Lazarus addresses a man as "Herr Dokter," "Herr Enemy," "Herr God," and "Herr Lucifer." She describes her face as a "Nazi lampshade" and as a"Jew linen." As previously described, one effect of these allusions is to implicate (involve) the reader, make him or her complicit in passive voyeurism by comparing him or her to the Germans who ignored the Holocaust. However, they also serve to establish the horrific atmosphere than be understood as patriarchy, as a society of consumers, or as simply cruel humans. No matter how one interprets the crowd in the poem, they complicate the poem's meaning so that it is a sophisticated exploration of the responsibility we have for each other's unhappiness, rather than simply a dire, depressive suicide note.