The first impression of Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” is disturbing and it proves to have fearful twist. The poem’s theme is one of sadness and lack of a paternal bond with one’s parent. The daughter is finding her closure with her father through this poem. This particular theme is portrayed through the use of dark and depressing imagery. Plath is skillful with her use of detail and emotional pull. The imagery brings up personal feelings which makes it easy to visualize the meanings that Plath intends to portray in the poem “Daddy”.
The poem “Daddy” is similar to a final statement of freedom to a father from his daughter. The simple title suggests that it was meant for one particular person and that person is this woman’s father. The fifth line in the poem, “Barely daring to breathe or Achoo,” suggest that the narrator is feeling trapped because of her father and her feelings towards him (Plath 866). The visual image that can be interpreted from this sections is of how one would feel if they lived in a very small place with no room to move or breathe. The simple way to describe how the daughter is feeling is to say that she feels confined by exactly who her father was. This woman feels the weight of the world on her or perhaps it is the burden of who her father is that weighs her down, and in line eight she describes her father as “Marble-heavy, a bag full of God”(Plath 866). The reference to God suggest that the father was viewed as a god himself by his daughter at first, similar to any little girl who looks up to their daddy. The father is portrayed as a very large and imposing man, especially in line ten where his size is being compared to a Frisco seal, which brings to mind a very large aquatic mammal with blubbery features (Plath...
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...s up to her father (Plath 867).
The overall theme of sadness and lack of a paternal bond is defiantly more powerful because of the imagery that Plath used. The Nazi rule of Germany was a dark time for many people and the references to that ordeal make this poem even more visual. The holocaust is so well known and the comparison of one’s life to details that actually happened shows how extremely depressed the speaker was. Fear is a very strong emotion and it drives people into many difficult situations, but the strength it takes to face those fears is so much stronger. The speaker found the power to overcome the trauma left by her father and she found her closure in the end.
Works Cited
Plath, Sylvia. “Daddy” Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing. Ed. X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. 7th Compacted ed. New York: Pearson, 2013. 739. Print
...X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama, 8th Ed., edited by Joseph Terry. New York: Longman, 2002.
pity in the reader by reflecting on the traumatic childhood of her father, and establishes a cause
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’s jarring poem ‘Daddy’, is not only the exploration of her bitter and tumultuous relationship with her father, husband and perhaps the male species in general but is also a strong expression of resentment against the oppression of women by men and the violence and tyranny men can and have been held accountable for. Within the piece, the speaker creates a figurative image of her father by using metaphors to describe her relationship with him: “Not God but a Swastika” , he is a “… brute” , even likening him to leader of the Nazi Party; Adolf Hitler: “A man in black with a Meinkampf look .” Overall, the text is a telling recount of her hatred towards her father and her husband of “Seven years” and the tolling affect it has had on
...lems, such as depression, sadness, overbearing and domineering figures. The themes shared in each poem is also a common similarity, such as the example of numbness. The choice in the speaker of each poem is also important, and also share a similarity between the two poets. The idea that the two women wrote poems that shared stories from their own life is not far-fetched, especially in the case of Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy”. Of the three poems, I found “Daddy” to be the easiest to understand because of its full sentences and vivid description. Furthermore, since the poets wrote as if the speaker of the poem was themselves, I found that their poems were more emotional and gripping than if they were not. Because of this, I considered their poetry very similar in that the speakers are like-minded emotionally, but the writing style of the poets themselves is different.
Throughout the poem, Plath contradicts herself, saying, ‘I was seven, I knew nothing’ yet she constantly talks of the past, remembering. Her tone is very dark and imposing, she uses many images of blindness, deafness and a severe lack of communication, ‘So the deaf and dumb/signal the blind, and are ignored’. Her use of enjambment shows her feelings and pain in some places, in other places it covers up her emotional state. She talks of her father being a German, a Nazi. Whilst her father may have originated from Germany, he was in no way a Nazi, or a fascist. He was a simple man who made sausages. ‘Lopping the sausages!’ However she used this against her father, who died when she was but eight, saying that she still had night mares, ‘They color1 my sleep,’ she also brings her father’s supposed Nazism up again, ‘Red, mottled, like cut necks./There was a silence!’. Plath also talks of her father being somewhat of a general in the militia, ‘A yew hedge of orders,’ also with this image she brings back her supposed vulnerability as a child, talking as if her father was going to send her away, ‘I am guilty of nothing.’ For all her claims of being vul...
An individual’s attitudes can determine how they relate to society. Sylvia Plath incorporates an analogy of the Holocaust in her poem to depict the strained relationship between father and daughter. The “black shoe”, an item of the Gestapo uniform, introduces the reader to this theme and establishes the tone of relationship between Plath and her father. (Plath, line 2) The shoe itself is symbolic of masculinity and suggests that the father is the “brute” his daughter envisions. (Plath, line 49) Plath declares that she, “may well be a Jew”, suggesting that her father’s death was an act of hatred against her, similar to that of the atrocities committed by the Nazis during the Holocaust. The assonance of the long ‘oo’ sound carried throughout the poem and this phrase creates the illusion that a child is speaking it. This greatly affected the way I perceived this stanza. I feel that the brutal images evoked by references to “Dachau, Auschwitz” and “Belsen” juxtaposed against this childish tone makes the reference appear superficial and tasteless. While I understand that Plath is attempting to issue blame for her father’s absence and is issuing part of it on her ‘ethnicity’...
Plath, Sylvia. "Daddy." Poets.org. Academy of American Poets, n.d. Web. 01 Apr. 2014.
Plath and Sexton's lifetimes spanned a period of remarkable change in the social role of women in America, and both are obviously feminist poets caught somewhere between the submissive pasts of their mothers and the liberated futures awaiting their daughters. With few established female poets to emulate, Plath and Sexton broke new ground with their intensely personal, confessional poetry. Their anger and frustration with female subjugation, as well as their agonizing personal struggles and triumphs appear undisguised in their works, but the fact that both Sexton and Plath committed suicide inevitably colors what the reader gleans from their poems. However, although their poems, such as Plath's "Daddy" and Sexton's "Little Girl, My String Bean, My Lovely Woman," deal with the authors' private experiences, they retain elements of universality; their language cuts through a layer of individual perspective to reach a current of raw emotion common to all human, but especially female, understanding.
Is this a good idea? and fair and good. Deliberately Shocking. What specific effect/response/reaction might she be trying to get from the reader, and why? When trying to describe her pain regarding her father, the narrator of Plath’s “Daddy” connects her situation to that of the Jewish people who were forced to endure the Holocaust.
The overall general theme of both poems is about the author’s father. Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz” and Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” may both reference their fathers, but their relationship and attitudes towards them differ immensely. “My Papa’s Waltz” features a theme of fear and love towards the father, while “Daddy” features hatred and loathing towards her father. Roethke uses imagery and diction that makes the reader feel different emotions. The imagery of a father with whiskey on his breath and battered knuckles paints a picture of a scruffy, rugged man.
Throughout the poem "Daddy" by Sylvia Plath, the author struggles to escape the memory of her father who died when she was only ten years old. She also expresses anger at her husband, Ted Hughes, who abandoned her for another woman. The confessional poem begins with a series of metaphors about Plath's father which progress from godlike to demonic. Near the end, a new metaphor emerges, when the author realizes that her estranged husband is actually the vampire of her dead father, sent to torture her. This hyperbole is central to the meaning of the poem. Lines 75-76 express a hope that they will stop oppressing her: "Daddy, you can lie back now / There ís a stake in your fat black heart." She concludes that her father can return to the grave, because she has finally rid herself of the strain he had caused her, by killing his vampire form. Despite this seeming closure, however, we will see that the author does not overcome her trauma.
Daddy was written on October 12, 1962 by Sylvia Plath, shortly before her death, and published posthumously in Ariel in 1963. Throughout the poem it could be viewed from a feminist perspective, drawing attention to the misogynistic opinions and behaviours of the time it was written. Misonogy is a person who dislikes, despises, or is strongly prejudiced against women. It can be manifested in numerous ways, including sexual discrimination, denigration of women, violence against women, and sexual objectification of women. Plath uses the reversal of gender stereotypes/roles within Daddy, which could be interpreted as an attempt to empower women.
Sylvia Plath has brought the attention of many Women’s studies supporters while being recognized as a great American poet. Most of her attention has come as a result of her tragic suicide at age thirty, but many of her poems reflect actual events throughout her life, transformed into psychoanalytical readings. One of Plath’s most renowned poems is “Daddy”. In this poem there are ideas about a woman’s relationship with men, a possible insight on aspects of Plath’s life, and possible influences from the theories of Sigmund Freud.
The poetry of Sylvia Plath can be interpreted psychoanalytically. Sigmund Freud believed that the majority of all art was a controlled expression of the unconscious. However, this does not mean that the creation of art is effortless; on the contrary it requires a high degree of sophistication. Works of art like dreams have both a manifest content (what is on the surface) and latent content (the true meaning). Both dreams and art use symbolism and metaphor and thus need to be interpreted to understand the latent content. It is important to maintain that analyzing Plaths poetry is not the same as analyzing Plath; her works stand by themselves and create their own fictional world. In the poems Lady Lazarus, Daddy and Electra on Azalea Path the psychoanalytic motifs of sadomasochism, regression and oral fixation, reperesnet the desire to return to the incestuous love object.