Analysis of Plath's Poem Daddy
What relationship is not a "Love-Hate" relationship? As we grow older and mature, we harden like a rock and have to suffer the realization that perfection is a mirage on the horizon. Sylvia Plath makes this clear in the undercurrents of her poem, Daddy. Plath reflects on her suffering, not only of her loss of father, but also on her childhood, rough marriage, and attempted suicide.In the first stanza, Plath makes a reference to a black shoe (line 2). I believe this reference refers to her home ("black") and her home-life ("shoe"). In this stanza, Plath gives us the feeling that her home life was a bad, dark and dreary one. We also see in this first stanza the fear she has towards her father. For years she lived with this fear barely able to do anything. She says, "For thirty years, poor and white,/Barely daring to breathe or Achoo" (lines 4-5). The second stanza begins with the narrator wanting to kill her father, but her father dying before she could get a chance (lines 6-7). Plath also saw her father as a god; fearful and big. She says, "Marble heavy, a bag full of God/Ghastly statue with one gray toe/Big as a Frisco" (lines 8-10). The image the reader gets here is a tall statue made of marble of a god who was
Her next action, following her failed attempt, is another reflection of her hidden love for the man she hated so thoroughly. She marries a man who is like her father: The tongue stuck in my jaw (lines 22-25) Sylvia Plath uses her poem, Daddy, to express deep emotions towards her father's life and death. With passionate articulation, she verbally turns her feelings of rage, abandonment, and grief from her childhood into a moving on and growing up state in her adulthood. Plath gives us an image of the Holocaust to show us how much she suffered at the hands of her father in her childhood. She made him Hitler and herself an innocent Jewish girl being sent to a concentration camp. feared by the people. Flowing into the third stanza, Plath continues with her description of the statue of which she imagined her father to be like. Even though she feared her father and wanted him to die, she loved him. After he has passed, she wanted him back. "I used to pray to recover you" (line 14). Plath is unable to "put to rest" the memory of her father.
Some common words found in the essay are:
Auschwitz Belsen, Daddy Plath, Sylvia Plath, , poem daddy, stanza plath, plath makes, failed attempt, father childhood, loss father, reflection father, sylvia plath, failed marriage, attempted suicide,
Approximate Word count = 1338
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)
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