Daddy Essay

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

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.

When the Blockalteste told him that he couldn’t help his father anymore, Elie thought, “He was right” (111). In the end, Elie’s father died and therefore cutting their relationships even more. Another example is when Mier killed his father over a piece of bread. The need for survival in the Holocaust made people even kill their family. Meir and his father’s relationship was torn up because of the Holocaust. Elie noticed that “Sons abandoned the remains of their fathers without a tear” (92). This shows the inhumane behavior the Holocaust evoked between sons and fathers. Towards the end of the book, people were ready to kill anyone to survive, even their family. Last but not least, when they all were running in the snow so that the Russians would not find the prisoners, Rabbi Eliahu’s son abandoned his father. Rabbi Eliahu and his son’s relationship was broken right when his son felt the need to abandon him. Elie had saw him intentionally run faster than his father and described the son’s actions as “letting the distance between them become greater” (91). This can have a literal and a figurative meaning behind it. The son running faster than his

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

The poem "Daddy" by Sylvia Plath concludes with the symbolic scene of the speaker killing her vampire father.  On an obvious level this represents Plath's struggle to deal with the haunting influence of her own father who died when she was a little girl.  However, as Mary G. DeJong points out, "Now that Plath's work is better known, ‘Daddy' is generally recognized as more than a confession of her personal feelings towards her father" (34-35).  In the context of the poem the scene's symbolism becomes ambiguous because mixed in with descriptions of the poet's father are clear references to her husband, who left her for another woman as "Daddy" was being written.  The problem for the

These images and allusions to horrific crimes against humanity do an excellent job of creating an image of death as a horrible, painful thing. Plath alludes to the burning of the Jews in large ovens, burning them down to ash, so that nothing was left but “gold fillings,” and a “wedding ring,” as well as makes reference to another disturbing report that some Nazi soldiers made soap out of the Jew’s as well as lampshades. These terrible images are designed to paint a wretched view of death. Interestingly enough, these images and ideas that death is a horrible, bad thing runs contrary to the speakers actual feelings that death is a great way to escape life, and in the end it is all she (the speaker) really wants to do.

Famous poetry concerning family matters is seldom joyful or enthusiastic; take, for instance, the works of Sylvia Plath and Theodore Roethke, who use different literary devices to describe their abnormal relationship with their fathers in their respective poems, “Daddy” and “My Papa’s Waltz.” Plath relies on metaphors, conceit, diction, and tone to convey her thoughts, whilst Roethke makes use of similes, diction, and poem structure. Both authors use different literary devices to describe their unusual relationships with their fathers; however, the ambiguity in Roethke’s poem makes it hard to say for certain what kind of relationship is being portrayed, whereas Plath’s poem describes her feelings towards her father in a clear-cut manner.

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

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.

Inspired by their true-life memories, Plath and Sexton explore a variety of themes in their poems. They both have different aspects of the relationship between a father and a daughter. The fathers in Sexton and Plath’s life had a major position and made an influence on their life and in their

How Sylvia Plath's Life is Reflected in the Poems Daddy, Morning Song, and Lady Lazarus

On the other hand, her father died when she was ten and she still saw him as this massive man standing at the blackboard with a cleft chin and a soft heart, but as she grew older, she became more aware of her father’s truth. He was a Nazi who spent his days working to round up Jews and working under Hitler. For the rest of her life, she racked her brain