Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy” is a rollercoaster full of emotion. At first, the poem sounds similar to a nursery rhyme; one in particular called “Hickory Dickory Dock”. In lines one and two, the speaker says, “You do not do, you do not do / Any more, black shoe”. The speaker uses a sing-song way of speaking. The structure of the poem is comprised in sixteen five-lined stanzas. Plath wrote the poem in quintains with an irregular meter and irregular rhyme. She uses hard sounds, short lines, and repeated rhymes. Her usage of the word “Daddy” emphasizes her childlike cadence. This poem embodies the distress she suffered when remembering her father. She emphasizes linguistically the speaker’s reliving of her childhood experience with her dad. Although …show more content…
The poem does not start off that way; however, once we get to the second stanza, it becomes apparent that the tone has changed from a sing-songy nursery rhyme to a more somber tone of voice. In lines 6 and 7, the speaker of the poem states, “Daddy, I have had to kill you. / You died before I had time--”. Plath’s form and structure start to get even more interesting because we begin to see the line breaks in her sentences; she will start a sentence at the end of a stanza, but then will continue her complete thought in the next one. Her use of vivid imagery begins to show in lines 8, 9 and 10 when she describes her father as, “Marble-heavy, a bag full of God, / Ghastly statue with one gray toe / Big as a Frisco seal”. She’s saying that his corpse was stiff and heavy, but also that she looked up to him as if here were a god. The speaker continues by saying, “And a head in the freakish Atlantic / Where it pours bean green over blue” (11, 12). The description of the father as “marble-heavy” and as a “ghastly statue” reveals the ambivalence of her attitude, for he is also associated with the beauty of the …show more content…
After attempting suicide, she seems to find a new direction in her in life. She shows us this in lines 64 and 65 where it states, “I made a model of you / A man in black with a Meinkampf look”. This relates to the Electra Complex because she tells us in the next stanza, “And love of the rack and the screw / And I said I do, I do” (66, 67). She’s describing how she married a man who reminds her of her “daddy”. Earlier when she claimed how “Every woman adores Fascist”(47), she is now showing herself in love with a
The poem is written in the father’s point of view; this gives insight of the father’s character and
Specifically, both the context of the poem and Plath’s life. In “Daddy” Plath displays what is called an Electra complex. The Electra complex is similar to the Oedipus complex where the daughter feels an unyielding sense of affection towards her father. In the book “The Norton Introduction to Literature” by Kelly J. Mays, it goes more into detail about the Electra complex where despite Electra having a “tyrannical” father, “Electra persists in loving her deeply flawed father long after he is dead” (1100). In order to translate this complex into her writing, Plath chose to compare her flawed father to a well-known tyrannical force. By using this comparison we get a sense of what her relationship with her father was like. The Electra complex is also apparent throughout the poem, where in the beginning we see how her younger self associated her father with this god-like figure and despite the obvious fear Plath had for him through the line “I have always been scared of you,” (41) she wanted to end her life in order to “get back” to him (59). Supporting the notion that Plath did have an Electra complex with her father at least throughout her childhood.
The first two stanzas, lines 1-10, tell the readers that Plath, for thirty years, has been afraid of her father, so scared that she dares not to “breathe or Achoo.” She has been living in fear, although she announces that he’s already dead. It is obvious that she believes that her father continues to control her life from the grave. She says that she “has had to kill” him, but he’s already dead, indicating her initial promise to forget him. She calls him a “bag full of God,” telling us that she considers her father a very strong, omnipotent being, someone who is superior in her eyes.
Plath never got over the loss of her father and her failed marriage to well known poet Ted Hughes. She wrote, "Me, I never knew the love of a father, the love of a steady blood-related man after the age of eight .... I hated men because they didn't stay around and love me like a father" (cited in Hughes & McCullough, 1982, pp. 266267). In an article, Jon Rosenblatt describes her poetry by saying “Whether the poems take place inside a house or in the countryside, the identical metaphorical relationships are established between a vulnerable speaker and a destructive environment.” By the end of “Daddy” the speaker comes off as a force to be reckoned with and her message is final
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
Plath writes in seven line stanzas. She uses a unique rhyme scheme that changes from in each stanza. Occasionally she isolates one line in order to annunciate its meaning. She also uses enjambment to help stress the meaning of certain lines. Plath also like to use metaphor and simile in her poem. Lines nine and ten she uses simile when she writes, “Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut. Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in”. She is stationary in her bed and almost doesn’t want to see everything anymore but she cannot hide what is going on around her.
Since she was so young she never got to work out her unsettled feelings with him. Even at age eight, she hid when he was around because she was fearful of him. When she was in his presence his strict and authoritarian figure had left an overpowering barrier between their relationship. Sadly enough by age eight Plath instead of making memories with her dad playing in the yard she resented him and wanted nothing to do with him (Kehoe). These deep-seated feelings played a major role in Plath’s poetry writings.
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.
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.
In the poem, “Daddy,” Sylvia Plath shows her character to have a love for her father as well as an obvious sense of resentment and anger towards him. She sets the tone through the structure of the poem along with her use of certain diction, imagery, and metaphors/similes. The author, Sylvia Plath, chooses words that demonstrate the characters hatred and bitterness towards the oppression she is living with under the control of her father and later, her husband. Plath’s word choice includes many words that a child might use. There is also an integration of German words which help set the tone as well. She creates imagery through her use of metaphors and similes which allow the reader to connect certain ideas and convey the dark, depressing tone of the poem.
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.
Plath is very good at baring her emotions, and holds nothing back when she writes “Daddy,” a poem reflecting the anger she directed at both her father and her husband. She uses references to torture when describing the relationship with both of these men: “And a love of the rack and screw / And I said I do, I do / So daddy, I’m finally through.” (68)
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.
A brief introduction to psychoanalysis is necessary before we can begin to interpret Plaths poems. Art is the expression of unconscious infantile desires and the strongest of these desires is the wish to “do away with his father and…to take his mother to wife” (Freud, “Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis 411).This is what Freud called the Oedipal conflict. For women the desire is of course reversed to killing the mother and marrying the father and is called the Electra complex. Children resolve this conflict by identifying with their same sex parent. Loss of a parent can prevent the normal resolution of the Oedipal conflict and result in a fixation or obsession with the lost object (object is the term used to define the internal representations of others). The desire to have the lost object back is also the desire for what Freud called primary narcissism. ...