FRIDAY VIDEO/FILM POEM: Sylvia Plath's 'Lady Lazarus' and 'Daddy'

These older gems have been on YouTube for 5 or 6 years. The first, Sylvia Plath Reads Lady Lazarus, has about a quarter of a million views; the second, Sylvia Plath Reads 'Daddy,' is in the half a million range. In the world of video/film poetry, these two flicks are superstars.

Unfortunately they come to us without any filmmaker information. Who made them? Who is the actress? That information was not recorded, or was cut off, when they were copied from British television at least 20 years ago or longer and later transferred to a format for uploading to YouTube. I was unable to find anything on their origin after an afternoon of looking on-line, but am very glad that these film poems are there for us to see.

Each film uses Sylvia Plath's own readings of her poems. Her readings are as powerful, intense, and gripping as her confessional poetry. Both were recorded by the BBC shortly after they were written. The power that drove her to write them is, to my ear, in her voice as she reads them. The cauldron of her creativity was still on fire. They are riveting, strong poems on the page, and aurally. I would have liked to see her as she read her poetry that day, but we can only imagine her presence.

Sylvia Plath, as many readers might know, was a talented poet who was married to Ted Hughes and who bore two children with him. After they separated, Plath awoke before dawn each day and wrote her most inspired poetry, collected in the slim volume, Ariel. She committed suicide by turning on the oven after blowing out the pilot light and blocking the drafts under the doors while her children slept. Her death ricocheted her to posthumous fame. She has been an immensely popular and influential poet for almost 50 years.

Her final poetry arises out of a world that is still dealing with the massive and inhumane deaths during the war. Coming to grips with the Holocaust, for instance, a painful and sensitive issue, was especially acute in the post-war period. Plath's father was German, and she not only felt abandoned at 8 years of age when he died, but he became symbolic of the Nazi spirit to the young poet who identified with the Jewish people who were gassed to death in the concentration camps. 'Daddy,' the second film poem below is an indictment not only of Nazi Germany but of the horrors its descendants deal with.

Plath is a lyrical poet whose "I" becomes the "I" of a crazed humanity on the brink of destruction, even as she wills her horse, Ariel, "Into the red /Eye, cauldron of morning."

The film poem, Sylvia Plath Reads Lady Lazarus, opens with an image of one of her poems, in reverse - white writing on black. It is a rough draft of Lady Lazarus and we can see how she worked and re-worked her poems, scratching words out, re-writing until they sang to her with dark intensities. She had attempted suicide a number of times in her life and refers to her ability to come back to life; like Lazarus that Jesus brought back from the dead, she is "A sort of walking miracle," "And like the cat I have nine times to die." In the film poems, lights appear and disappear in the darkness that is a continuing motif throughout both pieces. Lady Lazarus is mostly black and white, but when colour appears, it is iridescent. Sylvia bitterly states, in what are surely the most famous lines of the poem, "Dying /Is an art, like everything else. /I do it exceptionally well." Images come and go almost like pictures flung on the wall by turning lamps, reflected, meeting the poem, retreating into the darkness. Photographs of Sylvia appear in the film, and they are haunted by her speaking. And there is an actress, a beautiful woman, who appears and disappears, a woman who might be "the same, identical woman":

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.



Sylvia Plath Reads Lady Lazarus

"This video is an excerpt from a television arts documentary from about fifteen years ago. The images are very haunting and compliment the poetry extremely well." presumably the original uploader,  mishima1970, in a comment 5 years ago

The BBC tells us (where you may read and listen to the longer poem in its entirety), "This powerful reading was recorded for the British Council only days after the poem was written and is slightly longer than the version published posthumously in the collection 'Ariel'."



Sylvia Plath Reads 'Daddy'

"It IS Sylvia Plath reading it, and it is the official BBC recording from 1962. She recorded about twenty poems in her own voice, and this is one of them." presumably the original uploader, mishima1970, in a comment 4 years ago

If you would like to hear "Sylvia Plath interviewed by Peter Orr of The British Council - 30th October 1962," try here: http://youtu.be/S-v-U70xoZM before YouTube removes it for copyright violations (as it has done with other sites that also presented this material), unless, of course, the interview is now in the public domain (I was not able to certify this in an Internet search).

Because I don't wish to make this article too long, briefly I will say that the film poem, Sylvia Plath Reads 'Daddy,' crosses genres from a poetic rendition of a poem to a documentary. In it we find not only stock footage from the war of Nazi soldiers marching, and the terrifying transport trains for Jewish people sent to the concentration camps, but images from Sylvia's life float up at us - pictures of her during her life, a child here, a beautiful young woman there, scenes with her father and mother, her husband, Ted Hughes, even her father's gravestone. Like her poetry, which interweaves personal biography with horrendous political events, an intimate drive towards death by suicide with a collective desire to kill as shown by the scope of World War II, the film poem interweaves collected images of the poet's life with poetic images and film from the war itself. To say masterfully done barely describes this film poem. After you watch it you will understand why it has had 559,037 views and counting.