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
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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.”
The most obvious poetic devise of this poem is the rhyming scheme. Rhyming is when there is close similarity in the final sounds of two or more words or lines of writin.
The figurative language in the poem “Daddy” by Sylvia Plath can be used to discover a deeper significant of the poem. By using figurative language throughout the poem such as symbolism, imagery, and wordplay, Plath reveals hidden messages about her relationship with her father. Plath uses symbols of Nazis, vampires, size, and communication to help reveal a message about her dad.
The poem also uses end rhyme to add a certain rhythm to the poem as a whole. And the scheme he employs: aabbc, aabd, aabbad. End rhyme, in this poem, serves to effectively pull the reader through to the end of the poem. By pairing it with lines restricted to eight syllables. The narrator creates an almost nursery-rhyme like rhythm. In his third stanza however, his last line, cutting short of eight syllables, stands with an emphatic four syllables. Again, in the last stanza, he utilizes the same technique for the last line of the poem. The narrator’s awareness of rhyme and syllable structure provides the perfect bone structure for his poem’s rhythm.
It tends to be the trend for women who have had traumatic childhoods to be attracted to men who epitomize their emptiness felt as children. Women who have had unaffectionate or absent fathers, adulterous husbands or boyfriends, or relatives who molested them seem to become involved in relationships with men who, instead of being the opposite of the “monsters” in their lives, are the exact replicas of these ugly men. Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy” is a perfect example of this unfortunate trend. In this poem, she speaks directly to her dead father and her husband who has been cheating on her, as the poem so indicates.
In the poem “Daddy,” Sylvia Plath describes her true feelings about her deceased father. Throughout the dialogue, the reader can find many instances that illustrate a great feeling of hatred toward the author’s father. She begins by expressing her fears of her father and how he treated her. Subsequently she conveys her outlook on the wars being fought in Germany. She continues by explaining her life since her father and how it has related to him.
Sylvia Plath and Gwen Harwood tell two very different stories of parental relationships, Mother Who Gave Me Life praising Harwood’s mother and speaking with love and affection, whereas Plath’s Daddy is full of hate for her father. These reflections on the poet’s parental relationships are made using imagery, symbolism and tone.
The poem "Daddy" by Sylvia Plath concludes with the symbolic scene of the speaker killing her vampire father. On an obvious level this represents Plath's struggle to deal with the haunting influence of her own father who died when she was a little girl. However, as Mary G. DeJong points out, "Now that Plath's work is better known, ‘Daddy' is generally recognized as more than a confession of her personal feelings towards her father" (34-35). In the context of the poem the scene's symbolism becomes ambiguous because mixed in with descriptions of the poet's father are clear references to her husband, who left her for another woman as "Daddy" was being written. The problem for the
“Daddy” is perhaps Sylvia Plath’s best known and widely anthologized poems ever published. The poem comprised of a sixteen-five-line stanza, 80 lines and it is commonly understood to be about Plath’s deceased father. In Plath’s own words the poem is spoken by a girl in Electra complex describing the relationship between her and her father. This paper analyses the deeper meaning of the poem and how the poet used different elements of poetry to make meaning.
The poem "Daddy" by Sylvia Plath concludes with the symbolic scene of the speaker killing her vampire father. On an obvious level, this represents Plath's struggle to deal with the haunting influence of her own father who died when she was a little girl. However, as Mary G. DeJong points out, "Now that Plath's work is better known, ‘Daddy' is generally recognized as more than a confession of her personal feelings towards her father" (34-35). In the context of the poem the scene's symbolism becomes ambiguous because mixed in with descriptions of the poet's father are clear references to her husband, who left her for another woman as "Daddy" was being written. The problem for the reader is to figure out what Plath is saying about the connection between the figures of father and husband by tying them together in her poem.
Introduction: Conflicting perspectives are different points of view expressed and influenced by ones context and values. “Birthday Letters” by Ted Hughes is an anthology of poems challenging the accusation that he was responsible for his wife, Sylvia Plath’s death. The three poems The Minotaur, Your Paris, and Red are an insight into Hughes justification of the death of Plath using a very subjective and emotive poetic form. The poems possess many deliberate techniques such as extended metaphors, connotations, diction and juxtaposition to encourage the audience to accept his argument that he was not the one to blame for this world renown tragedy. The poem Daddy by Sylvia Plath also displays conflicting perspectives of the
Although everyone has a father, the relationship that each person has with his or her father is different. Some are close to their fathers, while some are distant; some children adore their fathers, while other children despise them. For example, in Robert Hayden’s poem “Those Winter Sundays” Hayden writes about his regret that he did not show his love for his hardworking father sooner. In Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy,” she writes about her hatred for her brute father. Despite both authors writing on the same topic, the two pieces are remarkably different. Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” and Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays” have different themes that are assembled when the authors put their different uses of imagery, tone, and characterization together.
Sylvia Plath is a passionate poet, and her poem Daddy shows a broad range of emotions. She likes to use her writing to let out all her delicate feelings and expresses how she feels in her poem Daddy. This particular poem of hers is somewhat dark and leaves the person who reads this with a sense of hopelessness and misery, the reader questions why the writer feels this way. The speaker of Sylvia Plath's poem "Daddy" depicts that she both loves and dislikes her father.
The whole point of the poem “Daddy” is Sylvia Plath shows her emotions of how drained she felt from losing her father at a young age and how one death affected her whole life. The use of Nazi symbolism is confusing, but plays a huge part in understanding the full meaning of what Plath was portraying. The use of intense imagery shows a story of Plath’s deepest emotions. The story Plath is describing shows the reader her extreme depression and every big moment in her life that hurt her. Consequently, one could describe the poem “Daddy” as a way for Plath to express her most depressive memories in her life.
Immediately upon the passing of Sylvia Plath’s father, Otto Plath, she was deeply mortified. Plath was only eight years old when her father died of pulmonary embolism following an injury complicated by diabetes. After his death, she began writing poetry as an escape from her emotions. Many of Plath’s poems have been influences by experiences from her own life such as the death of her father. Throughout Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy,” she uses powerful images to confess her attitudes toward her late father and also toward her husband. “Daddy” has an ironically affectionate title, for this poem is a violent attack on the dead parent. In the poem “Daddy” by Sylvia Plath, she uses metaphors, imagery, and symbolism to represent the holocaust.
How Sylvia Plath's Life is Reflected in the Poems Daddy, Morning Song, and Lady Lazarus