Daddy By Sylvia Plath Essay

Both Sylvia Plath and Lucille Clifton show great resentment toward their fathers that they are trying to overcome later in life. In the second stanza of her poem, Plath reveals her anger toward her father and his treatment of their family when she writes, “Daddy, I have had to kill you. You died before I had time.” This implies that the author may have strong enough feelings toward her father that she wishes she could have physically ended his life. It also shows that she is trying to bring an end to the control that he has over her life, even in his death. In “Forgiving My Father,” Clifton also shows a deep animosity toward her father and his inability and lack of motivation to provide for his family. The lines “there will never be time enough daddy daddy old lecher old liar” indicate that Clifton, too, carries unresolved feelings of resentment about her father that she struggles with even after his death. Both authors present a tone of anger, not only at their fathers for their behavior, but also at time for taking their fathers early and leaving them to deal with these feelings alone.

In stanza 12, she tells us that he has “bit her pretty red heart in two.” Next, she states that he died when she was ten, and when she was twenty years old, she attempted suicide - “…I tried to die, to get back back back to you.” In stanza 13 is where she starts talking about her husband. She says that instead of dying, her friends “stuck her together with glue,” and since she could not die to get back to her father, she would marry someone who was similar.

In the poem “Daddy,” Sylvia Plath describes her true feelings about her deceased father. Throughout the dialogue, the reader can find many instances that illustrate a great feeling of hatred toward the author’s father. She begins by expressing her fears of her father and how he treated her. Subsequently she conveys her outlook on the wars being fought in Germany. She continues by explaining her life since her father and how it has related to him.

But the point of anguish at which my mother killed herself was taken over by strangers possessed and reshape by them the collection of area poems became symbolic to me of this possession of my mother and of the wider vilification of my father it was if the clay from her poetic energy was taken up in versions of my mother made out a bit embedded reflect only the inventors as if they can possess my real actual mother and now or woman who would cease to resemble herself in those other minds.”(Plath

Sylvia Plath and Gwen Harwood tell two very different stories of parental relationships, Mother Who Gave Me Life praising Harwood’s mother and speaking with love and affection, whereas Plath’s Daddy is full of hate for her father. These reflections on the poet’s parental relationships are made using imagery, symbolism and tone.

The poem “Daddy” by Sylvia Plath is a revenge poem about her father. Her father died when she was ten and she has been affected by that her whole life. She misses him a lot and she even tried to kill herself to get back to him, “At twenty I tried to die and get back, back, back to you”(Plath). After she had failed at killing herself, Plath says “and then I knew what to do. I made a model of you” (Plath). She had married a man and modeled him after her father. Her husband abused her which did not make it any easier for her. Plath gets her revenge at the end of the poem because she says “if I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two” (Plath). This meant that if she killed her husband then that means she would have killed her father. Plath gets her

Throughout time, fathers and daughters have had special relationships. Some, the best relationship a girl could ever hope for. For others, the relationship is not so great. Sylvia Plath and Lucille Clifton wrote poems describing the darker side of a father-daughter relationship. Their poems demonstrate them in different ways. The poets of “Forgiving my Father” and “Daddy” demonstrate the theme, unresolved anger leads to lifelong bitterness, because both narrators hate their fathers for lying, blame their fathers for ruining their lives, and, finally, learning to cut their fathers out of their lives.

Although everyone has a father, the relationship that each person has with his or her father is different. Some are close to their fathers, while some are distant; some children adore their fathers, while other children despise them. For example, in Robert Hayden’s poem “Those Winter Sundays” Hayden writes about his regret that he did not show his love for his hardworking father sooner. In Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy,” she writes about her hatred for her brute father. Despite both authors writing on the same topic, the two pieces are remarkably different. Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” and Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays” have different themes that are assembled when the authors put their different uses of imagery, tone, and characterization together.

Over six million innocent lives were taken during the Holocaust. It had a significant effect on much of the world’s population, and it still has an impact to this day. In Sylvia Plath’s poem, “Daddy”, she shows her emotions for her father, Otto Plath. Sylvia Plath lost her father at eight years old when she still had much love for him (Famous People “Biography”). After a number of years, hatred is built up inside of Sylvia towards her father. When her father first died, she loved him and she grieved over her father’s death. After years of confusion, she eventually decided and wrote, “Daddy, Daddy, you bastard, I’m through” (Line 80). In “Daddy” by Sylvia Plath, the author resents her father and husband so much that they are comparable to Nazi Germans, showing her feelings for them through poetic devices.

As is inherent within the tradition of confessional poetry, a subgenre of lyric poetry which was most prominent from the fifties to the seventies (Moore), Sylvia Plath uses the events of her own tragic life as the basis of creating a persona in order to examine unusual relationships. An excellent example of this technique is Plath’s poem “Daddy” from 1962, in which she skilfully manipulates both diction, trope and, of course, rhetoric to create a character which, although separate from Plath herself, draws on aspects of her life to illustrate and make points about destructive, interhuman relations. Firstly that of a father and daughter, but later also that of a wife and her unfaithful husband.

In Sylvia Plath’s poem, “Daddy,” the speaker is a woman who passionately loves her father, but also hates him with a burning passion. As a child, the speaker was seeing her father as a God. The hatred comes from a fear towards her father because he completely dominated her life. Her unresolved feelings toward her father, result in all of her pain and sufferings. The, now adult, speaker is making an attempt to free herself from her father’s dominance.

The poem begins by the father first giving his son a very formal goodbye and explains the relationship between the two. Though it initially does not seem to be that deep, it later demonstrates the connection as he says “child of my right hand, and joy” showing the happiness the child brings his as well as how he is dependable or always right there. In the next line, he goes on to explain his sin which plays into the guilt aspect of this piece. He fears that his trouble was having too high of expectations for his first born, thus not giving the child enough faith that what he was doing was also acceptable. Perhaps the father is feeling that he did not give his child enough reassurance while he had the chance. The next line is key to the poem and tells us the age of his son when he died, telling us that he was seven year old, while the second part is saying that he is paying for his childs death.

Strong images are presented throughout the poem. The words "marble-heavy, a bag full of God" convey the omniscience of her father's authority and the weight it imposed on her throughout her life. Another strong image is the comparison of Plath’s husband to a vampire: “The vampire who said he was you / And drank my blood for a year, / Seven years, if you want to know.” This stanza accounts the way Plath’s husband stripped her of her sense of self. Plath gave Hughes her trust and he gained total control over her, which he used to his advantage, thus “drinking her blood.” Additionally, Hughes and Plath were married for exactly seven years before he left

“Daddy” written by Sylvia Plath an American poet best known for her dark, and confessional poems, and novels. Sylvia Plath lets you understand her thoughts through her writing, for example poems like “Daddy” and her novel The Bell Jar. More and more people learn about her work by reading her poetry or novels today. For one reason, this poem gives many emotions to the reader. By reading “Daddy” you can sense sadness, hopefulness, a broken child, while others may argue it is a cry for help. Secondly, Sylvia Plath casts herself as a victim by sharing all the negative feelings she experienced after her father’s dead. Lastly, Plath expresses how she portraits her father as a powerful figure, especially when Plath refer him as a Nazi, German, Frisco, and vampire. I feel this poem is very powerful because you can feel the writer’s emotions towards her father and including herself worth. In the poem “Daddy” it projects the emotions Sylvia Plath was trying to share with the reader. Poems like these can help other people deal with their negative feelings, by realizing they are not the only ones dealing with negative thoughts, and searching for the help they may need in case of a crisis.