Comparing Poems 'My Father Thought It And Daddy'

The poems “My Father thought it” and “Daddy” describes the relationship of a father and son, and a sense of discomfort for the child being around the father. “Daddy”, by Sylvia Plath, describes the child’s father as a dictator-like figure, who is controlling and is demanding. “My Father thought it”, by Simon Armitage, portrays the teenage years of the author, and the father’s disapproval of his will for independence. The poems both explore what it is like to be neglected and disrespected by a parent. ‘Daddy’, by Sylvia Plath, depicts her father as a dictator-like, controlling, evil figure. The father has “A cleft in your chin instead of your foot / But no less a devil for that, no not”. This tells us that the poet portrays her father as the devil, by comparing her father to it. The poem states that the father has “A cleft in your chin instead of your foot”; cleft feet are usually depicted on devils, and Plath creates a juxtaposition between her father and the devil. She also states “Any less the black man who / Bit my pretty red heart

Armitage calls him ‘Father’, which sounds distant and formal. The father, on the other hand, uses colloquial languages. For example, “My Father thought it bloody queer” shows that he finds the piercings in his son’s ears ‘weird’, in a negative way. The father judges his son’s actions throughout the poem in colloquial terms, such as ‘bloody queer” and “You’ve lost your head”. The difference in the language the two uses for each other accentuates the distance of the father and son. When the father calls his son a “Queer” it can be interpreted that the son is going through his rebellious stage, as “Queer” can also mean strange. However it can also be interpreted as the father thinking that his child was gay, to emphasize the father’s old-fashioned way of thinking, as piercings were thought to be only for women and ‘queers’ during the first half of the twentieth