Daddy

A detailed Summary of Daddy

As a poet Sylvia Plath has been renowned for her style of writing and the power she evokes from her ideas in her poems. The themes of her poems tend to be of a negative nature with war, death and the problem of patriarchal societies as such topics. One of Plath's most famous pieces of poetry is Daddy. The poem focuses on Plath's father, a man who left her at an early age resulting in a burning hatred on her behalf for him. Daddy is an example of Plath's dark and gloomy work and also displays her common poetic devices of vivid imagery, metaphors, similes and irregularity throughout her poems.

Ideally everybody deserves to grow up with two living parents, however Plath was not given this opportunity as her father died when she was only eight. In the poem Daddy, Plath, as the speaker, is having a one-way conversation with her father expressing all her feelings, anguish and how she tried to compensate for his death. The poem itself bares no metaphorical reading, only a literal reading which is broken up into three parts.

A common technique that Plath uses in her poetry is the metaphor. An example lies within the first stanza of Daddy. "Any more, black shoe, In which I have lived like a foot, For thirty years, poor

As it is documented, Plath was known to have lived a life of utter misery, one that included suicide attempts and breakdowns for which the major reason she put behind these was the loss of her father. For her mental illness, Plath received treatment, which included electro-shock therapy. She describes her treatment in Daddy with another metaphor. "But they pulled me out of the sack, and they stuck me together with glue.

Daddy is indeed a negative poem, one of many dark poems Plath has written. Never the less there is a great amount of power within the poem, a power from which Plath's feelings of her father have been expressed and one that condemns the patriarchal society. From her use of vivid imagery, metaphors, similes as major poetic devices, Plath has been able to evoke her ideas to readers worldwide.

During these contemporary times, the patriarchal society can be thought of as non-existent, however males still have a slight dominance. Although in the era Plath lived in, male dominance was the norm and she criticized society for this. In the poem, the persona describes her husband as "A man in black with a Meinkampf look." This reference to Hitler when describing her husband sets up a parallel likened to the one between her father and Hitler positioning the reader to see how the two significant men in the persona's life led to her downfall. This is further reinforced with the lines "The vampire who said he was you and drank my blood for a year." Metaphorically the persona describes how her life was being drained away as a result of a marriage, similar to that of how a vampire drinks the blood of their victims. It

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Approximate Word count = 1106
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: English