In “The Colossus” Plath expresses how the lost of her father effected the father- daughter relationship growing up. Plath’s father who was “absent”, emotionally affected her in many ways. His neglect was responsible for why they never had that father-daughter relationship, which is critical in the developmental stages of a young girl growing up. Rietz writes:
“In “The Colossus,” a “Blue sky out of the Oresteia/Arches above” father and daughter, an image which suggests that Plath is consciously harnessing for poetic inspiration the energies of her own family’s dynamics, the love and violence implied by the reference to the house of Agamemnon. The poem need not be read autobiographically, but in its distortions, its simultaneous worship of and contempt for the magnificent ruin, it mirrors what Plath typically reported feeling towards her father.” (421)
Not only did Plath already lack a relationship with her father, the death of her father climaxed the situation. When her father died when she was eight, all her hopes and dream of engaging in a meaningful relationship with her father w...
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 was known as an American Poet, Novelist and Shorty story writer. However, Plath lived a melancholic life. After Plath graduated from Smith College, Plath moved to Cambridge, England on a full scholarship. While Plath was Studying in England, she married Ted Hughes, an English poet. Shortly after, Plath returned to Massachusetts and began her first collection of poems, “Colossus”, which was published first in England and later the United States. Due to depression built up inside, Plath committed suicide leaving her family behind. Sylvia Plath was a gifted and troubled poet, known for the confessional style of her work, which is how “Mirror” came to be. Although this poem may seem like the reader is reading from first person point of view, there is a much deeper meaning behind Plath’s message throughout the poem. Plath uses several elements of terror and darkness to show change to the minds of the readers.
Sylvia's genuine emotion that shines through her work is rooted deep in her childhood. Sylvia was a perfectly normal child that enjoyed life until at age eight when she lost the closest person to her. Her father, Otto Plath, died from complication with diabetes. (Kehoe 1) Sylvia had been his favorite and hit her the hardest. The toughest part was that because of her age she was not permitted to go to the funeral so she was never able to let go and say goodbye. She never fully recovered and later in life became convinced that the majority of her pain was caused by losing her father. A. Alvarez, a friend and critic, stated years later “The death of her father, whom she loved, who abandoned her, and who dragged her after him into death.” (Kehoe 1) She tried to pick the pieces up and move on. She moved on to become a good student. In all her years of s...
When Plath was in college in 1953, her downward spiral began. The spiral started off when Plath’s writing internship was not what she expected it would be. Plath was more of a personal assistant than an actual writer. This realization was a sad reality to her because her goal was to be a write...
Helen of Troy, known as the most beautiful woman of ancient Greek culture, is the catalyst for the Trojan War. As such, she is the subject of both Edgar Allen Poe’s “To Helen” and H.D.’s “Helen”; however, their perceptions of Helen are opposites. Many poets and authors have written about Helen in regards to her beauty and her treacherous actions. There is a tremendous contrast between the views of Helen in both poems by Poe and Doolittle. The reader may ascertain the contrast in the speakers’ views of Helen through their incorporation of diction, imagery, and tone that help convey the meaning of the work.
This poem is a reflection of her feelings during this time period. She use some criticism on the last three lines of the poem. She says “Trepanned veteran,/Dirty girl,/Thumb stump”. She is comparing herself to a “trepanned veteran” who is a survivor of any type of war. She also call herself “dirty girl”. She feels guilty of her behavior knowing that she has two children. To conclude, Plath uses connotation and historical events to make a reflection.
Plath uses symbolism to illustrate the theme of death as she describes the death of a woman and her children. Based on her symbolism, Plath does not seem to regret death. She writes “The woman is perfected/Her dead/Body wears the smile of accomplishment.” In this line, Plath is using the actual death of the woman as a symbol of death being the completion of life, as she emphasizes that with death the “woman was perfected” and it was an “accomplishment.” She further conveys the idea of death as she writes “as the petals/Of a rose close” with the closing of the rose being symbolic of death being the closure of life. As the poet explains the woman’s children each being as “one at each little pitcher of milk,” the pitchers of milk are symbolic of a mother feeding her children with milk, and in the past would have been a symbol of life, however in the poem the pitcher of milk is “now empty” thus again suggesting symbolism of death. The dead mother has had feeling of love toward the
Being recognized as gifted in writing early on, Plath put all of her energy into this subject by becoming editor of her school’s newspaper and submitting over forty five articles to Seventeen Magazine before finally becoming published. Plath was a perfectionist when it came to writing. In college, the intense pressure of trying to maintain her scholarship and perfect grades started to get to her. She even wrote to her mother saying “I have practically considered committing suicide to get out of it [a science course] (qtd. in Malmsheimer 530). She also felt pressured as to what she would do with her life after college. “Her brilliance and accomplishments have no power to lead her to a place in the world. Instead, they drive her out of it” (Allen 400). As noted by Novels for Students, Part of Plath's frustration lay in what she perceived as a choice between becoming a free-spirited poet or choosing the wife/...
One of Philip’s greatest tactics in this piece, to convey her intense grief and desolation, is her use of promising phrases about her son’s future, and her sheer joy about what it holds for him. In doing this she is able to build an emotional connection between herself and the reader, “Seaven years Childless Marriage past/ A Son, A Son is born at last…”(5,6), “As a long life promised,” (9), and “Full of good Spirits, Meen, and Aier,” (8). The emotional feelings that are withdrawn from these phrases all resonate with the reader, and allow us to become much more sensitive to not only her and what she is going through, but also her son and his lack of life. The repetition of “Son” is very effective in showing how elated she was, and actually makes the depressing realization that follows even darker and more troublesome.
To her, the child’s eye is the storage of beauty, and he wish is to be at the same place as beauty. Beauty and happiness is compared to childhood mother’s inability to do much for her child. This gives us the aspect of how she lacked happiness in her life and also lacked to see any positive outcomes. This was one of the last poems that Plath wrote before her death.
Throughout the poem, the character compares her father to different people and labels him. However, the character specifically compares her father to a German and states that she “thought every German was [him]” (29). This line is a metaphor and also shows how by being able to create her father into different people it allowed her the ability to escape from what she was feeling and going through. It is a metaphor because in her mind she is creating her father a German but in reality, he is not actually a German. Most importantly, we also find out that she tried to commit suicide as a way to escape from her pain. She states that “[a]t twenty [she] tried to die/ [a]nd get back, back, back to [him]” (58-59). This shows the characters urge to escape from her feelings and, therefore, tried to commit suicide but didn’t succeed. Plath has portrayed death as an exit and a way to solve one 's problems by escaping rather than confronting them.
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. ...
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.
As stated above, some teenagers do have a problem to build the relationship with their parents. As she said in the poem, attempting suicide took place regularly when she was ten. Even though, Sylvia Plath did not mentioned her mother in the poem, the reader can found there is a something wrong with her mother. She did not say one word about her mother like the poem, Daddy. She does not have a companion to share her feelings, she does not have a supporter who could stop her first or second suicide attempt while she get accustomed to try to kill herself “like the cat.” This causes the reader to speculate that she might failed to bond with her mother from an early age.