The second time she had meant to do it earnestly. Plath tells a personal truth she was ten when she tried it for the first time. She finds it boring to attempt it again and again, and also irritating when a crowd of people surrounds to see her after the failed attempt at suicide. She is only thirty-one, and she has attempted three times. She continues of the vision in the next two stanzas also: she says that her flesh will soon be eaten by the grave. The image is horrible, but it seems that the speaker is trying to come to terms with death that she was trying to embrace by rejecting life and people. In the fifth tercet, Plath presents an image of her own dead body foreboding (and foreshadowing) her death. She then addresses the reader as her ‘enemy’, assuming that the reader is just the same male. But the very second tercet introduces Plath’s concern for the torture of the Jews: she compares her skin with the lampshade that the Nazi concentration camps made by flaying the Jew’s skin! Then another important stylistic element of the poem, that of surrealistic images, is also immediately introduced: the speaker irrationally compares her feet with a paperweight and her face with linen cloth, that the Jews wear.
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