Comparing Lady Lazarus And I Felt A Funeral, In My Brain

Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath are widely recognized for their tremendous ability to write about unbelievably morbid, personal, and somewhat taboo topics in a way that makes readers unable to look away from the page. This idea is especially true in Plath’s “Lady Lazarus” and Dickinson’s “I Felt a Funeral, in my Brain,” as both poems deal with the morose matter of mental illness. By thoroughly examining these poems, it is clear that they reveal underlying themes of immense pain and suffering, as evidenced by the literary tools of enjambment and end stop, along with various melancholy symbols and images.
In order to convey such incredible torment and despair, Plath utilizes the highly effective tools of enjambment and end stop. In “Lady Lazarus,”
The first line describes how the speaker “felt a funeral in her brain.” This funeral symbol is the first suggestion that something is definitely off cognitively with the speaker. If she is feeling a “funeral” in her brain, clearly she is not completely sound of mind. As the lines continue, the speaker’s mental disturbance is amplified further, especially in the lines which state, “Kept treading- treading- til it seemed/ That Sense was breaking through” (3-4). Here, the repetition of the word “treading” strongly enforces the idea that the figurative funeral is detrimental to the speaker’s health and is not in any way a pleasant experience for her, and it gives the poem a torturous feel. When reading it, the audience is heavily impacted, feeling as though they, too, are in pain.
Similar to the tools of enjambment and end- stop, symbolism and imagery both play paramount roles in each poem. In “Lady Lazarus,” the images which are perhaps the most profound, significant, and impactful are those which refer to the Holocaust. The speaker states,
A sort of walking miracle, my