Figurative Language In Those Winter Sundays

Certain times a person doesn’t see the love expressed by a father, thus staying ungrateful and insouciant toward them. Some eventually grow to see the many sacrifices made, but others become filled with hatred. Feeling trapped or ashamed the narrators rely heavily on memories of their childhoods with their fathers. While “Those Winter Sundays” (Hayden 318) and “Daddy” (Plath 345-47) explore the theme of familial love by utilizing a melodic rhythm, they use dissimilar literary devices and figurative language to reveal different personas of the poets.
Readers often explore the idea or underlying meaning of a literary work through theme, sometimes explicitly stated but the way a reader interprets it depends on their education or experience. Both

As an unrhymed poem, the rhythm created uses devices such as, consonance, repetition, and alliteration. The inconsistency rhyme schemes in both poems seem to reflect the speaker’s turmoil and feelings they harbor for their fathers. The poetic meter Plath uses gives a slow, almost childlike melody. Throughout the poem, a soothing sound with the continuous use of the “-oo” sound anchors Plath to a childlike tone. Words like “do,” “shoe,” “Achoo,” and “you” gain recognition with the continuation of the poem. Meanwhile, “Those Winter Sundays” provides fourteen-lines, but its meter distinguishes. Some examples of rhymes and near-rhymes are shown but no rhyme scheme. The first line is presented as a trochaic pentameter rather than the standard iambic pentameter. In order to capture the harshness of his father’s life, Hayden uses grating consonance sounds in the words “cold,” “cracked,” and “ached” (Line 2 and 3). Gradually, the “k” sounds become replaced with “o” sounds, like in the words “good,” “shoes,” “know” etc. these sounds evoke associations with love and

to enhance the reader’s feelings or the meaning of the text. In “Daddy” Plath relies on a Holocaust imagery to effect readers’ emotions. Line 43: she uses imagery to build a metaphor of her father as a Nazi. “And your neat mustache” becomes a reference to the atrocious perfection of Hitler’s mustache. Without a doubt, the references Plath uses evoke powerful emotions, she touches a sensitive subject, the Jewish genocide. Additionally, Plath addresses the father as a devil and vampire showing her hatred toward him. The use of the stylistic devices Plath chooses to use illustrate the extensive part of her life the father occupied. In Meanwhile, Hayden uses repetition toward the end of the poem. Line 13: he asks, “What did I know, what did I know.” This is the moment when Hayden, a chagrined and guilty adult, knows more about his father’s love than as a child. The repetition of the question allows readers to acknowledge the remorseful feelings the speaker now