would stand to reason that the speaker uses it (as most artists do) as an escape from life or the world. What, then, is Plath trying so hard to escape through her chosen "art"? The answer can likely be found in these lines:

The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see
Them unwrap me hand and foot—
The big strip tease.

The speaker feels that her life and pain are on display for an audience, which finds an entertaining quality in watching her repeated pain. They all "shove in" to get a closer look at the doctors who "unwrap" her, only to find that she is as human as anyone else.

Is the reader, by extension, now part of this crowd who finds some form of entertainment in reading of Plath's repeated suicide attempts? Plath reminds her audience that she is quite intentional in the methods she uses in trying to die:

Although there is a bit of hope, in the ending of this poem, that the speaker will rise like a phoenix out of this place of objectification, her scathing tone toward an audience who stands by, pressing in for their own benefit, leaves readers wondering how much we are each responsible for the unhappiness of others.

The tone of the poem is angry, bitter, and aggressive. Plath opens by alluding to her suicide attempts: she tried to commit suicide at ages ten and twenty, and she is now thirty. She writes:

I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it—

She then expresses her anger by reducing her body parts—herself—to things associated with death. She likens her skin to a "Nazi lampshade," an allusion to the Nazi's making lampshades out of Jewish skin during the Holocaust. She likens her foot to a paperweight, something heavy that holds her down, and sees her face as "featureless" and covered with "fine/Jew linen." These are all bitter images of immobility, death, and dehumanization, especially in her two allusions to the Holocaust. She envisions herself as a faceless corpse, like a Jew killed in the genocide.

Her anger comes through in the question of whether her face terrifies when you peel off the "napkin," the shroud-like fine linen, and expose her skeletal head with its "eye pits" and full set of teeth. These are aggressive images, as if she wants to terrify her reader with the image of her death's head.

When we come to her describing herself as a "smiling" woman, we understand that smile as the grin of a skull, especially as she alludes to being thirty, which means she is ready for another suicide attempt. She says she has "nine times to die." She states that "this is Number Three" and refers to herself as "trash."

Other angry, aggressive and bitter words include "shoves" and "shrieks." The image of people, after her second suicide attempt, having to "pick the worms off me like sticky pearls" is an unpleasant image meant to assail and shock the reader. The image that ends the poem, "I eat men like air," is also angry and aggressive.

There is no mistaking this for a gentle nature poem or a poem about love and forgiveness. Plath is consumed with a burning fury and is lashing out with her words against the people who have objectified her. She is bitterly discussing her death.

This is a wonderful poem by Sylvia Plath, who is known for her controversial and frank writing.

"Lady Lazarus" is often seen as as having many parallels to Plath's own personality and life.  The speaker is sarcastic and bitter throughout the poem.  Related to this, then, is tone.

Tone is the "mood" or "feeling" of a poem and its words.  Just like tone of voice, writing also has tones that are made through the author's words.

Plath's tone in this poem is one of bitterness and revenge.  Her "Lady Lazarus" appears as several different people, including a stripper and a sideshow freak.  She is seeking revenge against a man, a father, whom she equates to a demon (eNotes).

Having taken up the battle with the enemy on his terms, she concludes by warning the male deity and demon that when she rises from the ashes, she consumes men as fire does oxygen. (eNotes)

This is certainly a tremendous poem which owes its crackling energy in part to the way in which Plath combines a number of different techniques to make it appeal to our hearing. Consider the way in which Plath utilises a bewilidering array of end and internal rhymes, which are both exact and slant, combined with alliteration, repetition, consonance and assonance. Look at the following example:

Soon, soon, the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me

Note the internal rhyme in "grave cave" and the repetition of the vowel sound of "a" in the middle line and also the end rhyme of "be" and "me." It is the use of so many techniques combined with the gripping narrative that emerges in this poem that imbues it with such energy that drives us forward to the ending.