Essay on Analysis of Daddy by Sylvia Plath

The poems “Forgiving My Father” by Lucille Clifton and “Daddy” by Sylvia Plath highlight troubled relationships with the authors’ fathers. While most all family relationships have weakness and strife, the ones discussed in these writings are relationships that continue to haunt the authors many years after their fathers’ deaths. The poems are similar in the authors’ tone, point of view, their use of excuses for their fathers’ behavior, and their fathers’ treatment of the authors’ mothers.

The theme of obligation really stood out while during the last stanza of the poem. The speaker voices her obligation when she by saying, “I think on it in quiet, /I cannot spread wings to fly away,” (29,30). These lines show that the speaker has many thoughts that she does not verbalize, and that she cannot get those thoughts out of her head. The speaker feels obligated to keep all these things in so she does not upset her family, and be “met only with their rage.”.

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.

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

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.

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 is a revenge poem about her father. Her father died when she was ten and she has been affected by that her whole life. She misses him a lot and she even tried to kill herself to get back to him, “At twenty I tried to die and get back, back, back to you”(Plath). After she had failed at killing herself, Plath says “and then I knew what to do. I made a model of you” (Plath). She had married a man and modeled him after her father. Her husband abused her which did not make it any easier for her. Plath gets her revenge at the end of the poem because she says “if I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two” (Plath). This meant that if she killed her husband then that means she would have killed her father. Plath gets her

Plath’s father’s untimely death left her with an unhealthy sort of codependency, resulting in a skewed image of relationships in general. In Plath’s poem “Daddy”, the speaker details their relationship with their father as that between a Jewish person and a Nazi. The speakers describes the fear they experience in junction with their father. The speaker further elaborates on their father’s death when they were young, and that despite the deep resentment the speaker feels for their father, how it affected them deeply. Plath’s own father died when she was eight, and although he was a distant figure in her life due to his illness, she, too, was deeply moved by his death, relating back to the poem (Alexander, 32). What hurt Sylvia most about her father’s

To start off the analysis, the setting of the entire poem is significant. Though the poem takes place in a house, the atmosphere the house is set in is also important. The month is September which is a month of fall which can be seen as a symbol for decline. It definitely insinuates that the poem is leading towards death. Line 1 has “September rain falls on the house” which gives the feeling of a dark and cold night with a storm on top of that. To further develop that, Bishop gives us the failing light in line 2 to also give us an idea of the grandmother’s struggle. Bishop uses the cyclical theme of changing seasons to show the unending nature of what is transpiring within the

I’ve killed two-- The vampire who said he was you”. The powerful imagery of these

Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy,” is about a girl who has lost her father at a young age, and since his death, she cannot stop thinking about him. The speaker appears to be Plath consumed in metaphors that resemble the way she feels about her father and former husband. Plath’s father passed away when she was only eight in the poem she states, “I was ten when they buried you. At twenty I

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

By just reading Sylvia Plath’s works of writing, it is apparent that she had an infatuation with portraying negative and brutal thoughts. For example, her poem “Daddy,” she clearly expresses her rage towards her deceased father. The poem is full of contradiction and the interpretation is up the reader. Pieces like this gives insight into Sylvia’s mental sanity, which was questioned at times. In her early

One similarity between “Forgiving my Father,” and “Daddy,” is the obvious hatred towards a father figure, shared between both authors. In the poem “Forgiving my Father,” Clifton describes her father as an “old lecher old liar,” (9-10). Then in Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” she says this statement about her father “But no less a devil for that, no not, / Any less the black man who, / Bit my pretty red heart in two.” (54-56). Both these quotes illustrate the hatred surrounding the authors fathers. Clifton also says this statement about her father “daddy old pauper old prisoner, old dead man” (20). By using these harsh words, she reveals to the reader the strong hatred that she feels toward her father. Throughout Plath’s poem “Daddy,” she calls her dad brute multiple times also revealing how, like Clifton, she felt hatred toward her father. In both the poems the reader is referring to their dead fathers; revealing to the audience that even after these men have passed away the authors are still unable to forgive their fathers for the pain they caused in the lives. These are just a few examples of how both Clifton and Plath shows the audience the hatred they feel toward their fathers.