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"The lyrics of this particular song are so ethereal and multifaceted, and so clearly designed not to be interpreted one way, that unpacking them in relation to Mad Men would be foolish, and in any event, I seriously doubt that series creator Matthew Weiner and this episode’s principal crew intend us to. (It’s certainly not as simple as, ‘This song signaled the true beginning of the Sixties, and y’know, their next album was Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band, which was all psychedelic!’) But some lyrics do jump out, particularly, ‘It is not dying, it is not dying’ and ‘surrender to the void.’ The first line resonates because it can be read as both truth and denial of truth: the abysses that the characters peer into in ‘Lady Lazarus’ (which is named after a Holocaust-, suicide- and death-laden poem by Sylvia Plath, who eventually took her own life) do not represent dying, and yet at the same time they do. They’re images of potential death, or little personal deaths, or unspecified oblivions, or the unknown — the void. You can’t fight the void, or even knowledge of the void. You must surrender to it, let it wash over your or flow into you, then get on with life."