Daddy By Sylvia Plath Analysis

The figurative language in the poem “Daddy” by Sylvia Plath can be used to discover a deeper significant of the poem. By using figurative language throughout the poem such as symbolism, imagery, and wordplay, Plath reveals hidden messages about her relationship with her father. Plath uses symbols of Nazis, vampires, size, and communication to help reveal a message about her dad.

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

The last two stanzas are the darkest, and ultimately appear to put some type of closure on Plath’s life. She obviously believes that she killed her father when she was ten years old, stating that “if I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed

In the first stanza the reader realizes that Sylvia Plath is scared of her father. It is quite clear that she never spoke up to him to defend herself. In the first line it is apparent that something is ending. “You do not do, you do not do any more,

Plath describes her father as classically Aryan in appearance ‘your neat moustache/and your Aryan eye, bright blue’ making him the antagonist in their relationship, reinforced by her descriptions as herself as a Jew, or the victim, ‘chuffing me off like a Jew.../I have always been scared of you’. Although the Nazi comparisons are abundant throughout the poem she also uses symbolism and other comparisons to make the same point. She conjures the image of her father as a dark and monstrous creature who, ‘bit my pretty red heart in two/...the vampire who said he was you’ reinforcing the audience’s negative view of her father. The symbolic description of her father as vampire and Nazi gives the audience a clear idea of Plath’s father, destroying her and sucking out her life. In direct contrast with Plath’s dark image, Harwood’s representation of her mother is full of admiration and love, ‘It is not for my children I walk on earth.../it is for you’. She doesn’t give a description of her mother in the way Plath does of her father, using a more indirect approach to create a general, yet

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

Sylvia Plath is known as a profound writer, depicted by her lasting works of literature and her suicide which put her poems and novel of debilitating depression into a new perspective. In her poem “Lady Lazarus,” written in 1962, her mental illness is portrayed in a means to convey to her readers the everyday struggle of depression, and how it affects her view of her world, herself, and even those who attempt to tackle her battle with her. This poem, among other poetry pieces and her novel The Bell Jar, identify her multiple suicide attempts, and how the art of dying is something she has become a master of. Plath’s “Lady Lazarus,” about her trap of depression and suicide attempts, is effective and thought provoking because of her allusions to WWII Nazi Germany and the feelings of oppression and Nazism that the recurring images evoke.

     Although what stands out on first reading "Daddy" is the Nazi imagery, it is interesting to note that the father is not called a Nazi in the first half of the poem.  In stanza one he is a " . . . black shoe / In which [she has] lived like a foot" (2-3) which is certainly a stifling image but not yet a clear reference to the father's evil nature.  Next he is "Marble heavy, a bag full of God" and a "Ghastly statue" (8-9), images which reveal the daughter's struggle to cope with his death but do not reflect any bad intent on the part of the father.  The next two images describe Otto Plath's death, which resulted from gangrene in his toe.  According to K.G. Srivastava, "The grey color of the toe [in line 9] refers to the gangrene that Otto Plath contracted" and "The image of ‘Frisco seal' [line 10] recalls the ‘amputation from the thigh of the gangrened foot and leg' and the consequent prosthesis" (127).  These references to the father's fatal injury continue to indicate the daughter's trauma, but they still do not paint the man as evil.  In fact, these images arouse sympathy for the speaker's father, far from the hate of the rest of the poem.

I’ve killed two-- The vampire who said he was you”. The powerful imagery of these

Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy,” is about a girl who has lost her father at a young age, and since his death, she cannot stop thinking about him. The speaker appears to be Plath consumed in metaphors that resemble the way she feels about her father and former husband. Plath’s father passed away when she was only eight in the poem she states, “I was ten when they buried you. At twenty I

Sylvia Plath wrote “Mad Girl’s Love Song” in the early fifties while she was an undergraduate college student. The poem is written in the villanelle poetic form of which it reflects not only the rigorous fixed format, nineteen-line with two repeating rhymes and two refrains but also the melancholic tone and rhythm of the traditional dance song—in vogue in Italy and France during the sixteenth century—in which its roots lie. The title itself offers a plausible explanation for choosing the villanelle poetic form, which strict metric certainly helps to convey the sense of torment and alienation that emerges from the refrains repeated throughout the poem. A rising crescendo from one stanza to the next builds

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.

The villagers can be thought of as another persona for Plath who has gotten over her resentment of her father and now has just decided to forget about him. "They [the villagers] are dancing and stamping on you. / They always knew it was you," is almost ambiguous because it is not clear whether Plath is directing this to her husband or her father. If to her father, it means that she has figured out that it was her father in Ted?s place all along and subconsciously Plath knew that and didn?t want to believe it. Yet, in the last line, it is clear that Plath was able to resolve her conflicts. She finishes the poem with a powerful, "Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I?m through" ? showing her dead father