Biographical Interpretation Essay

The poems “Forgiving My Father” by Lucille Clifton and “Daddy” by Sylvia Plath highlight troubled relationships with the authors’ fathers. While most all family relationships have weakness and strife, the ones discussed in these writings are relationships that continue to haunt the authors many years after their fathers’ deaths. The poems are similar in the authors’ tone, point of view, their use of excuses for their fathers’ behavior, and their fathers’ treatment of the authors’ mothers.

Sylvia Plath’s poem, “Daddy,” is a confessional poem that addresses an unknown speaker’s appalling relationship with her father. Plath’s unmistakable use of allusions enable her readers to have a clear understanding of what life was, and is, like with the speaker’s overbearing father. She describes him as all powerful, Godlike, and the speaker soon reveals that she intends to kill him. However, before she has the chance, he dies on his own. His death leaves the speaker with unresolved feelings towards him that are later converted to her surrogate father, her husband, until she finds the courage to free herself from his control. Throughout the poem, Plath reveals several representations that were relevant to her own life that suggest her and

Sylvia Plath uses her poem, Daddy, to express deep emotions toward her father’s life and death. With passionate articulation, she verbally turns over her feelings of rage, abandonment, confusion and grief. Though this work is fraught with ambiguity, a reader can infer Plath’s basic story. Her father was apparently a Nazi soldier killed in World War II while she was young. Her statements about not knowing even remotely where he was while he was in battle, the only photograph she has left of him and how she chose to marry a man that reminded her of him elude to her grief in losing her father and missing his presence. She also expresses a dark anger toward him for his political views and actions

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 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.

Compare the ways in which poets reflect on parental relationships – Daddy by Sylvia Plath and Mother Who Gave Me Life by Gwen Harwood

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

As we develop from children to adults, our perception of our parents can change drastically. The theme of the loss of innocence is portrayed in both poems, through the relationship with a father. Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘Daddy’ is an extremely personal confession about realising her father was not the role model she had believed when she was young. The poem mentions that her father “died before I had time” and she “was ten when they buried you. At twenty I tried to die and get back, back, back to you”. The tone of the entire poem is bitter and sharp as Plath pours all her internalized feelings towards her father into the poem. Gwen Harwood explores the same theme of losing childhood innocence, but in a distinctly different way. The poem tells a story of a small child, who is determined to lose their innocence and is instead “a horny fiend”, sneaking out with their father’s gun. Harwood’s poetry sheds light on the idea of wisdom and growth and the desire children feel to be considered mature. Plath ends her poem in a defiant tone, claiming “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through”, indicating she is done with thinking about or mourning him and has reached a point where she can move on from the grief he has caused her. On the other hand, Harwood’s poem ends grimly, after the child’s father tells them to “End what you have begun” and the child kills the owl, before “I leaned my head upon my father’s arm, and wept, owl blind in

“Daddy” is perhaps Sylvia Plath’s best known and widely anthologized poems ever published. The poem comprised of a sixteen-five-line stanza, 80 lines and it is commonly understood to be about Plath’s deceased father. In Plath’s own words the poem is spoken by a girl in Electra complex describing the relationship between her and her father. This paper analyses the deeper meaning of the poem and how the poet used different elements of poetry to make meaning.

In Sylvia Plath’s free verse poem, “Daddy,” she describes her hatred towards her deceased father. Plath uses tone, figures of speech, and symbols to illustrate her extreme anger and female protest towards the man that raised her. Sylvia Plath has a dark, bitter tone in “Daddy.” She recalls all the pain that her father has put her through, even after his death.

In the poem “Daddy” the main character explains his dislike of her father and how he is happy that he has died. He stated that she would have rather killed him herself. I believe that his father was a Nazi during the Holocaust. Initially when I first read the story I did not understand the meaning of it, but after reading it a second time I understood why the main character felt the way he felt. The main character was afraid to be around his father, He couldn’t even sneeze the wrong way around him. Her father is described as a big hefty man that she described as a “bag full of God”. She also felt as if she was not German because she had not learned the language and felt distant from him, she felt more like a Jew and even started talking like one. It is also revealed that she killed her husband and that her mother might be half Jewish.

In Sylvia Plath’s infamous poem, “Daddy,” she gives us insight into the speaker’s relationship with her father. It may be difficult to understand their connection within the first few lines due to the murky, dark tones of the poem. Did the speaker hate her father, or did the speaker love him? After reading, the poem itself could be seen as a cry for help and to finally acknowledge how his death made the speaker feel. The speaker had lived 23 years of her life without her father, spending that time feeling lonely and trapped, confined within the mere eight years of memories she had with him before his passing. The poet created a powerful image of the speaker’s father using heavy metaphors to illustrate his authority and powerful influence. The speaker lashes out at her dead father in what can be called a “hate poem”, presumably because she feels abandoned by him after his death. The speaker remains elusive throughout the poem on whether she is done with his hold over her, or whether she’s finally gotten through to her father’s character and she now understands him. The poet displays the intricacies of a father-daughter relationship and all of its complexities through diction, metaphors, imagery and tone, creating a compelling piece that makes readers wonder whether there was any love involved.

She said so herself. All in all, I think she succeeded. Her songs are examined and recognized and even loved by various around the globe. Her work isn't irrelevant free verse admission corner; countless better poems are capable, complex and superbly diminish. Daddy is an undertaking to join the person with the incredible. It has a bleeding edge that cuts into your mind and heart. It's disturbing, a strange nursery rhyme of the parceled self, not an uncontrolled assault of temper went for her father and life partner. The father is seen as a dim shoe, a goliath statue, a swastika and a vampire. The young woman is a loss, ending up in some fascinating spots - in a dull shoe, in a sack, and it may be stated, in the plan as it chugs along. It makes sense of how to express Sylvia Plath's own internal misery by skillfully sprucing up in sweet casing and offering the examine a kind of dull myth that combines the lighter echoes of Mother Goose with altogether darker resonances of World War

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.

Sylvia Plath, an incredibly renowned poet and novelist, is well-known for her macabre, troubling, yet amusing works of literature. One of the hallmarks of this is her poem “Daddy.” In this poem, the speaker figuratively describes her relationship with her father through many caustic, abrasive metaphors. The narrator emphasizes her resentment towards her father in this poem, however, the speaker is unable to conceal the fact that she loves him as well. As such, this poem is filled with raw emotional turmoil and no clear ideological champion by the end.