Understanding the "The Three Systems of a Poem" by Molly Peacock, through Sylvia Plath's "Lady Lazarus"

"Poetry is really the fusion of three arts: music, storytelling, and painting."The line displays the poem's music, the sentence displays its thoughts, and the image displays the vision of the poet. When we talk about the body of a poem - its anatomy - the line is like a skeletal system, the sentence is like a circulatory system, and the image is like a central nervous system."

"THE LINE. Lines make the music of the poem. They function as a skeleton, holding the poem up. Lines contain every aspect of sound, from how words sound alike and different to how they reflect emotion - how such sounds, in fact, are emotions themselves. The line always means rhythm and sometimes means rhyme. Even a free verse poem that doesn't seem to have a regular rhythm or an obvious rhyme schme still has the baseline bones of music. The line's music give us our instinctive understanding of a poem, even when we can't articulate it" (How To Read a Poem and Start a Poetry Circle, 19-20).

"THE SENTENCE. Sentences open up the thoughts of the poem. The mainstay of prose, the storyteller's tool, sentences circulate through the lines of poems, often flowing past the lines themselves, pumping their meaning down through the poem, even when the poem is in fragments or has no punctuation to let us know where sentences begin and end. The sentences appeals to our intellectual pleasure, and following a sentence through a poem often enables us to articulate what we've understood."

"THE IMAGE. The image is the visual art of the poem. ... imagery sends the poet's vision, fired into word-pictures, throughout its length, the way the nerves inside a spinal cord send electrical charges to muscles. If the line is a way a child apprehends, intuitively, and the sentence is the way an adult apprehends, intellectually, then the image functions as a two-way mirror bewteen these states of understanding. It is both instinctive and constructed" (Peacock, 20-21).

POEM: "Lady Lazarus", 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.
23-29 October 1962