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Essay Analysis of Daddy by Sylvia Plath

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Analysis of Daddy by Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath uses her poem, Daddy, to express deep emotions toward her father’s life and death. With passionate articulation, she verbally turns over her feelings of rage, abandonment, confusion and grief. Though this work is fraught with ambiguity, a reader can infer Plath’s basic story. Her father was apparently a Nazi soldier killed in World War II while she was young. Her statements about not knowing even remotely where he was while he was in battle, the only photograph she has left of him and how she chose to marry a man that reminded her of him elude to her grief in losing her father and missing his presence. She also expresses a dark anger toward him for his political views and actions …show more content…

She also presents a slight rhythm to the reading that allows for smooth reading. In keeping with her open form, there is no set scheme to the rhyme pattern. However, there is a single ending sound constantly repeated without a set pattern throughout the work. She also connects pairs of lines at random just for the sake of making connections to make that particular stanza flow. At the same time, she chose blatantly not to rhyme in certain parts to catch the reader’s attention.
There are a few instances where imagery is used to carry out Plath’s expression. To cite a particular example that might lead a reader deduce their own ideas can be found in the last stanza: “And the villagers never liked you. / They are dancing and stamping on you.” This undoubtedly expresses her father’s death and burial but more importantly it states a certain humiliation she faced from everyone knowing what her father had died for, along with her own rage toward him. Another can be found in lines 24-25: “I never could talk to you. / The tongue stuck in my jaw.” The picture of someone being tongue-tied along with her statement in line 41: “I have always been scared of you,” demonstrate just that; she was fearful of her father. She also gives an image that provides the reader a view of how Plath physically viewed her father and chose a man that she states reminds her of him: “A man in black with a Meinkampf look.”

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