The poem “Daddy” was written in 1962. Sylvia Plath discusses her love/hate for father and others using imagery from the Holocaust, Nazis, and vampires. The title of the poem suggests that it is loving and intimate, more so than if it were titled “Father”. That is where love is present. Hate and anger are present everywhere else in the poem.…
Problems with men start at a young age for most women. Daddy issues is a perfect explanation for the piece “Daddy” written by Sylvia Plath. The complications that occurred early in Plath’s life then occurred in Plath's love life. After doing some research on Plath, it was apparent that a continuing theme in her life was issues with men. To fully understand this piece I had to do some research on Plath.…
The poem “Daddy” can be considered to be confessional. Plath attacks both her husband and her father symbolically. She relates herself to a Jew and relates her father to Hitler. This image shows that their relationship is distant and she is afraid of him, she is confined and helpless to his domination. Later on, Plath introduces her husband;" A man in black who is a "model" of her dad and will torture her free will as well and so he did for seven years, as stated in the poem which is relevant to how long their marriage lasted. Plath also searches for the father she never grew up with; he had died when she was eight. It almost seems as she wants to hate him, more than she did so it is easier for her to say goodbye to his memory.…
“Elm”, written about her toxic marriage to poet Ted Hughes, mainly focuses on her struggle to recover from her husband’s infidelity. However, much like many of Plath’s other pieces, elements of the poem can be interpreted as referring to her ongoing battle with depression. A prime example of Plath’s writing that can be interpreted in different ways is the line “I am terrified by this dark thing/ That sleeps in me” (“Elm” 31-32). Many choose to interpret this dark thing as her remaining love for her husband. Since the idea of love directly correlates to the overall theme of the poem, this is a popular interpretation of what the “dark thing” is referring to. However, considering Plath’s mental state at the time of writing, it can also be argued that the dark thing “sleeping” inside her is more likely the personification of her depression. Other lines in Sylvia Plath’s “Elm” reference both her heartbreak and her depression at the same time. Plath writes, “I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets”(16). By this, she means that she has had to suffer through the horrific ends of beautiful experiences. The most obvious of these beautiful sunsets that ended tragically is Plath’s marriage to Hughes. This metaphor can apply to more than just her relationship, however. It can also be applied to her life. Plath’s early life was, for…
Plath’s anger and despair is cumulatively articulated in her poem Daddy. Her use of language techniques powerfully instructs and elicits sympathy in her readers when revealing her suffering and perspectives of her father. Daddy is a ‘confessional’ and a judgmental poem, addressed directly to her father with bitterness and sadness about her personal sufferings. This negativity with the apparent warmth of the title makes the title ironic; the title carries connotation of hatred rather than usual connotation of affection. Grotesque imagery of the creature’s ghastliness and size, a symbolic metaphor for her father, is shown in ‘Ghastly statue…Big as Frisco seal’ heading to ‘the freakish Atlantic’. The cumulative tricolon of ‘Ich, ich, ich’ symbolise her stuttering and insecure feelings as a result of not being able to talk to her father. The rhythmic…
Written in the early 60 's, the pre-era of the feminist movement, Sylvia Plath 's Daddy reflects the increasing atmosphere of feminist awareness - a harsh critique of patriarchal authority and women 's relegation to passive roles. The persona is of an angry daughter trying to come to terms with the betrayal of men in her life; events that parallel Plath 's own strained relationship with her father and her failed marriage. Hence, the poem is filled with Nazi and Gothic imagery to emphasize the victimization that the narrator feels at the hands of these men ("fascist", "Luftwaffe", "devil", "vampire"). By constantly comparing her and her father with a Jew and Nazi respectively, the narrator darkly enforces the dictatorship of her father over her, almost to a sense where her identity as a person has been dominated and annihilated like the genocide of the Jews in the hands of Hitler - "Chuffing me off like a Jew/ A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz,…
One can see that they had a huge impact on who Sylvia Plath was as a writer. “Sylvia Plath’s most famous poem, adored by many sons and daughters, is “Daddy”. It is a poem with an affecting theme, the feelings of the speaker as she regathers pain of her father’s premature death and her persuasion that has betrayed her by dying.” (Howe 1055). Sylvia Plath’s father died at a very young age, she was only eight years old. She always viewed her father as a strict man. Plath even compared her father to a Nazi. (“Panzer-man, panzer-man, O’ You”). This poem is a reflection of how Sylvia feels towards her father and the anger she has for him dying so young. “Sylvia Plath tries to enlarge upon the personal plight, give meaning to the personal outcry, by fancying the girl as victim of a Nazi father: “An engine, an engine / Chuffing me off like a Jew. . . .” ( Howe…
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s piece, “The Yellow Wallpaper” (written in 1890, published in 1892), is a semi-autobiographical piece that, although believed to be a result of her severe postpartum depression, illustrates the difficulties faced by women during the Women’s Movement. These difficulties are further illustrated by the similarly semi-autobiographical poem, based on Plath’s father and husband, “Daddy” by Sylvia Plath (written in 1962, published in 1965). These gender roles are then reversed in “Editha,” (written in 1898, published in 1905) which has been said to be William Dean Howells’s response to the Spanish-American War. “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “Daddy” by Sylvia Plath and “Editha” by William Dean Howells all illustrate the conflict in gender roles during the Women’s Movement in 19th and 20th Centuries.…
As Sylvia Plath described about the poem “Daddy,” she said that the poem spoken by a girl with Electra complex. Her case was more complicated by the fact that her father was a Nazi, and her mother was possibly part Jewish. This part is the thing that made me so confused because at that time of her life, 1932 to 1963, was the time that the Holocaust happened, 1941 to 1945. The Holocaust was a genocide in which about six million European Jews were killed, included 1.5 million children, by Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany, and the World War II collaborators with the Nazis. As the…
Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” is a brutal, spiteful poem which is commonly understood to be about her father Otto Plath. The poem begins…
Plath 's poetry is full of symbols and allusions cryptic to those unfamiliar with her biography, so it is necessary to begin any analysis of her work with a brief account of her life. Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932 near Boston and for much of her childhood lived near the sea, which finds its way into many of her poetic images (Barnard 14). Her father, Otto Emil Plath, was an immigrant from Germany and her mother, Aurelia Schober, a second generation Austrian American (Barnard 13). Allusions to her German heritage and to World War Two era Europe abound in her work.…
The end of World War One transitioning into the great depression would make for an unlikely time for two European descendants to birth one of the most highly influential poets of their time. October 27, 1932 would mark the day that Otto Plath and Aurelia Plath had become the parents of this astounding poet Sylvia Plath. The relationships that she would begin to form with her parents from such a young age would be a unique and complicated tale. Reflections of Sylvia’s upbringing in these unique times would be shown throughout many outlets of hers including her personal life and demeanor as well as her relationships and most of all her poetry. The works of Sylvia Plath have often been described as confessional…
Aurelia, Sylvia’s mother, was a student at Boston University. She met Sylvia’s father, Otto Plath, he was her professor. Her parents got married in January of 1932. In 1940, Plath was eight years old, her father died as a result of complications from diabetes. Her father’s strict attitudes and his death drastically defined her poems, especially in her infamous poem “daddy” (“Sylvia Plath”). “ Daddy, I have had to kill you. You died before I had time--” (“Sylvia Plath”). These two lines in her poem “daddy” express how much it hurt when her father passed away. Her relationship with her father was strong and they were extremely close.…
Every kid needs a person to be there for them and teach them important things of life like talking to girls, playing sports, riding a bike and so much more. Growing up without a father is a very hard thing to go through and can change a person’s entire life. In the poem “Daddy” by Sylvia Plath and the song “Father Of Mine” written by Art Alexakis the narrators both grew up without a father. In both pieces of work their father left them at a very young age. Plath seems to have a bit of hatred towards her father.…
As the poem continues on, Sylvia Plath goes on to describe the anger and resentment from the child towards the father. A strong example of this is when the child begins to compare the father to many things that can be perceived as unkindly. The first thing the father is compared to is Hitler. “I have always been scared of you, With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo. And your neat mustache; And your Aryan eye, bright blue. Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You——” This stanza describes, in appearance, the likeness of Hitler and the father. The father is then compared to the devil in the lines, “A cleft in your chin instead of your foot; But no less a devil for that, no not; Any less the black man who…” This section describes the father as no better than the devil. The final comparative for the father is that of a vampire, sucking the blood, or life from…