Many people view poems and other pieces of writing in different ways, there is no wrong or right way to interpret a work of someone, it merely your point of view; your opinions. In Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy”, many could say that it was a about a hard relationship she had with her father, but how do we know? It could be about her father, husband, strong authority figure, or even God. But, as I read “Daddy” I got the strong sense that it was mostly about her father. The poem suggests that she had either an unhealthy relationship with him or she was angry with him for leaving her. In the poem, Plath says “I have always been scared of you” (41); I view this as she may not have had the best relationship with him. Maybe he was abusive or mean. Maybe he was cold-hearted. But the truth is, for some reason, she was upset about her father’s death. She writes earlier in the poem about how she tried to get to him. She wanted to kill herself so she could be with him up in Heaven. In the beginning of her poem she uses the word “black” I feel to express her emotions. Black symbolizes death and darkness and that’s just how she felt. She prayed for him to come back but he didn’t so she got angry with him for that. In many areas of the poem, she uses very dark wording and very strong language. In many cases, we cannot fully understand the meaning of her sentences solely based on the fact that she wrote this poem in the 1960’s. It is a quite difficult poem, but yet a brilliant one at that. The poem was uniquely written with every stanza giving off tons of information and emotion. I think that this poem was so strongly written because she did feel so strongly for her father. She hated the fact that he left her, she missed him. So instead of sitting ...
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...I read about her life, I can see that it was more than that. It was about how she felt and how she wanted to express her feelings. She went through great depression after her father died and this poem shows that. She tried killing herself to get to him. Although Sylvia Plath obviously had some depression problems and she was quite emotionally unstable, I do believe that this was a brilliant poem where she was able to express herself.
Works Cited
Reuben, Paul P. "Chapter 10: Sylvia Plath." PAL: Perspectives in American Literature- A Research
and Reference Guide. URL:http://www.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap10/plath.html.
Plath, Sylvia. “Daddy” Literature: An Introduction to Fiction,
Poetry, Drama, and writing. Ed. X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. 11th. Ed.
New York: Longman, 2010, 1074-1075. Print.
It tends to be the trend for women who have had traumatic childhoods to be attracted to men who epitomize their emptiness felt as children. Women who have had unaffectionate or absent fathers, adulterous husbands or boyfriends, or relatives who molested them seem to become involved in relationships with men who, instead of being the opposite of the “monsters” in their lives, are the exact replicas of these ugly men. Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy” is a perfect example of this unfortunate trend. In this poem, she speaks directly to her dead father and her husband who has been cheating on her, as the poem so indicates.
In American society, the common stereotype is that the father has the role of the dominant figure in the household. Sylvia Plath and Sharon Olds may come across as two seemingly different poets, however, they are really quite similar, especially in their driving forces behind their writing styles in poetry. The lives of Plath and Olds are both expressive of the realities of a father-dominated family, in which both of these poets lost their fathers at a young age. This is significant because both poets have faced a similar traumatic event that has had everlasting effects on their adult womanhood, which is reflected in their writings. For both these woman, their accesses to father-daughter relationships were denied based on life circumstances. Ironically, their fathers were their muses for writing and are what made them the women they are today.
Sylvia Plath a highly acclaimed twentieth century American poet whose writings were mostly influenced by her life experiences. Her father died shortly after her eighth birthday and her first documented attempt at suicide was in her early twenties. She was married at age twenty-three and when she discovered her husband was having an affair she left him with their two children. Her depression and the abandonment she felt as a child and as a woman is what inspires most of her works. Daddy is a major decision point where Plath decides to overcome her father’s death by telling him she will no longer allow his memory to control her.
...lems, such as depression, sadness, overbearing and domineering figures. The themes shared in each poem is also a common similarity, such as the example of numbness. The choice in the speaker of each poem is also important, and also share a similarity between the two poets. The idea that the two women wrote poems that shared stories from their own life is not far-fetched, especially in the case of Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy”. Of the three poems, I found “Daddy” to be the easiest to understand because of its full sentences and vivid description. Furthermore, since the poets wrote as if the speaker of the poem was themselves, I found that their poems were more emotional and gripping than if they were not. Because of this, I considered their poetry very similar in that the speakers are like-minded emotionally, but the writing style of the poets themselves is different.
Sylvia Plath, a great American author, focuses mostly on actual experiences. Plath’s poetry displays feelings and emotions. Plath had the ability to transform everyday happenings into poems or diary entries. Plath had a passion for poetry and her work was valued. She was inspired by novelists and her own skills. Her poetry was also very important to readers and critics. Sylvia Plath’s work shows change throughout her lifetime, relates to feelings and emotions, and focuses on day to day experiences.
Sylvia Plath lived a good, yet depressed life. She was born on October 27th 1932, in Boston Massachusetts to Aurelia and Otto Plath. Sylvia grew up with her brother in an ordinary household, under a strict father. Her childhood was happy, until in 1940, a week and a half after her eighth birthday, her father died due to complications of his untreated diabetes. This led to a loss of faith for a young Sylvia that she would never be able to regain and fueled her desire to write poetry and stories when she was ten. During her adolescence, she won many awards and honors for her writings and at age eighteen she received a scholarship to Smith College. That was when Plath’s symptoms of her severe depression began to emerge. In 1953 she attempted to take her own life, by overdosing on sleeping pills. She was hospitalized and given electro-shock therapy, and she fictionalized her experiences in her novel, The Bell Jar. In 1955 Plath moves to Cambridge England on a scholarship and met Ted Hughes, and English Poet...
In Plath's "Daddy," written just before her death and published posthumously, the most readily accessible emotion is anger, and much of the poem is couched in autobiographical allusions. Plath's own father died of a gangrenous infection, caused by diabetes he refused to treat, when Plath was eight years old, and his death was "the crucial event of her childhood" (Baym 2743). Plath makes personal references to her father as a...
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
The highly recognized female novelist and poet, Sylvia Plath, lived a hard and tragic life. Plath was diagnosed with depression, a mood disorder that causes consistent feelings of sadness, at a very young age that made her life complicated in many ways. The battle continued on when she was diagnosed with severe depression later on in life which contributed to her death. Sylvia Plath was a very successful novelist and poet in the thirty short years of her life, however, the achievements were not enough to mask her depression battle that ran and ended her life.
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.
Known for her distinctive voice and exploration of dark, violent emotions, Sylvia Plath was one of the most acclaimed poets of the twentieth century. In her poems she discusses many common themes such as family relations, marriage, self-image and death in unique ways. Among these topics, she expresses a particularly original perspective on motherhood and its effect on the individual that often deviates completely from the traditional view of child rearing. In her poems “Moonrise,” “Heavy Woman” and “Morning Song,” Plath conveys the idea that motherhood, although necessary, is a personal as well as physical sacrifice that involves much pain and suffering.
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.
Sylvia Plath’s life was full of disappointment, gloominess and resentment. Her relationship status with her parents was hostile and spiteful, especially with her father. Growing up during World War II did not help the mood of the nation either, which was dark and dreary. At age 8 Plath’s father of German ancestry died of diabetes and even though their relationship was never established nor secure, his death took a toll on her. “For Sylvia, who had been his favorite, it was an emotional holocaust and an experience from which she never fully recovered” (Kehoe 90). 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. Along with his “hilterian figure,” her father’s attitude towards women was egotistical and dismissive, uncondemning. This behavior infuriated Plath; she was enraged about the double standard behavior towards women. Plath felt controlled in male-dominated world (Lant). “Because Plath associates power so exclusively with men, her conviction that femininity is suffocating and inhibiting comes as no surprise” (Lant 631). This idea of a male-dominated world also influenced Plath’s writing. Unfortunately, Plath married a man just like her father Ted Hughes. “Hughes abandonment apparently stirred in her the memories and feelings she had struggled with when her ...
Through her dark and intense poetry, Sylvia Plath left an eternal mark on the literary community. Her personal struggles with depression, insecurities, and suicidal thoughts influenced her poetry and literary works. As a respected twentieth century writer, Sylvia Plath incorporated various literary techniques to intensify her writing. Her use of personification, metaphors, and allusions in her poems “Ariel,” “Lady Lazarus,” and “Edge”, exemplifies her talent as a poet and the influence her own troubled life had on her poetry. According to “Sylvia Plath” Sylvia Plath struggled with severe depression throughout her life.
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.