Point of View

“Lady Lazarus” is spoken from a first-person point of view by an unnamed “I,” who describes herself as a woman of 30 who dies once every decade. This first-person perspective is privileged throughout the poem, as 19 of the 28 tercets include “I,” “me,” or “my,” making the speaker herself the central focus. One of the few subjects in the poem to be spoken of independently of its relation to the speaker is death, or rather the act of dying. As the speaker says, “Dying / Is an art, like everything else” (43-44). Though she asserts her dominance through this art, she again distances herself from the subject when she shifts from making declarations that privilege her point of view, like “I do it so it feels real. / I guess you could say I’ve a call” to neutral third-person statements like “It’s easy enough to do it...