Gwenvia Plath Poem Analysis

One of the most difficult, yet rewarding roles is that of a parent. The relationship between and parent and child is so complex and important that a parents relationship with her/his child can affect the relationship that the child has with his/her friends and lovers. A child will watch their parents and use them as role models and in turn project what the child has learned into all of the relationship that he child will have. The way a parent interacts with his/her child has a huge impact on the child’s social and emotional development. Such cases of parent and child relationships are presented in Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz” and Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy”. While Roethke and Plath both write about a dynamic between a child-father relationship that seems unhealthy and abusive, Plath writes about a complex and tense child-father relationship in which the child hates her father, whereas Roethke writes about a complex and more relaxed child-father relationship in which the son loves his father. Through the use of tone, rhyme, meter, and imagery, both poems illustrate different child-father relationships in which each child has a different set of feelings toward their father.

Through the juxtaposition between past and present, organic imagery and a pronounced tone of both wonder and tranquility marking the language, Gwen Harwood's poetry delineates the nature of grief, fear, and memory as they personify human experience. The events described in "Father and Child", is an exploration of the existential and moral concerns of the poet. Both poems exemplify the ideals of maturity as compared to immaturity. 'The Violets' on the other hand explores the reconciliation of past memories. How one who cannot be comforted in the moment, can be comforted by memories instead. Fear is the main focus on Harwood's most psychological poem 'The Glass Jar'.

In Father and Child, as the persona moves on from childhood, her father becomes elderly and is entertained by simple things in nature, “birds, flowers, shivery-grass.” These symbols of nature remind the persona of the inconsistency of life and the certainty of death, “sunset exalts its known symbols of transience,” where sunset represents time. Both poems are indicative of the impermanence of life and that the persona has managed to mature and grow beyond the initial fearlessness of childhood moving onto a sophisticated understanding of death.

Everyone has a father. No matter if the father is present in a child’s life or not, he still exists and takes that role. A father has a major impact on his child whether he knows it or not, and that impact and example shapes the child’s perspective on life, and on love. The authors, Robert Hayden and Lucille Clifton, share the impact of their fathers through poetry, each with their own take on how their fathers treated them. The poems “Forgiving My Father” and “Those Winter Sundays” have significant differences in the speaker’s childhood experiences, the tone of the works, and the imagery presented, which all relate to the different themes of each poem.

Whether you realise it or not, the act of representation is a constant and significant aspect of our lives. It defines and influences our perceptions of things in either a positive or negative way. One poem that I particularly admire from Harwood’s collection is ‘The violets’ , as it recognises the inevitable act of evolving without our childhood memories. The art of growing up and moving forward is only fully accomplished when we recognise and accept the experiences and explorations of our childhood. Harwood’s poetic style reflects her conservative, traditional and religious upbringing, as well as her interests in literature, philosophy and music. As one of Australia’s finest poets, and it is an honour to introduce Harwood’s latest poem anthology.

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

Throughout Gwen Harwood’s "Selected Poems", Harwood continually seeks to examine the many different faces of human nature, which have been heavily influenced by her experiences as a child, a woman and in the moments prior to her death. Her poems explore and reveal the power of reminiscence and memories, rebellion against authority, as well as the idea of mortality, which are illustrated by many of Harwood’s different personas.

Poetic techniques displayed through the ideas, poetic features and style of the poet, reveal concepts which transcend time and place. In Gwen Harwood’s poem “the violets” her ability to interweave past and present emphasises the importance of memory in preserving ones journey though the universal experiences of growth, maturity and mortality. Similarly the poem “Mother who gave me life” demonstrates the memory of motherhood as a timeless quintessential part of the human condition. And lastly In Harwood’s “father and Child”, the connection between the father and son/daughter highlights that transformation throughout childhood is inevitable. Through the content and the language, the ways in which human experiences reveal concepts which

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.

Harwood explore ideas concerning childhood innocence and experience through her poems, reflecting her deep interest in philosophy and the human experience. As a young contemporary reader, Harwood’s emphasis on the importance of childhood memories is particularly resonant, evoking the audience to reflect upon their own naïve recollections. This is also supported by the critic Hoddinott who stated that within Harwood’s body of work, “dreams of childhood have a particular power…perception of the truth with fear of the unknown” is also evident in “The Violets” where the importance of memories is explored as a reflection on an individual’s growth from naivety to experience. Harwood uses the rhetoric “Where’s morning gone?” in recognition of the carelessness exhibited in childhood

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.

Gwen Harwood, a contemporary female poet, born in Brisbane Australia in the 1920 's, wrote her poetry during a time where Australian society held dominant gender ideologies that focused on domesticating women. A widely held belief of a passive, nurturing mother figure who looked after her children and complied with her duties as a 'house-wife ', whilst men were viewed as the sole source of income and had a minimal nurturing role with children, was shared, along with ideas of male superiority, and of masculine qualities being superior to feminine qualities, both of which were only expected to be embodied by males and females respectively. The construction of people, places and institutions through poetic conventions in Harwood 's poetry allows the audience to identify these cultural beliefs in conventional gender roles and expectations within 1950 's Australian society in particular. These constructions critique the attitudes and values of the time, especially where women are concerned, and thus position the audience to reject the patriarchal assumptions of the time. Her poems Suburban Sonnet and Prize Giving are can be perceived as radical interpretations and criticisms of the views of the time they were written in, and attest to Harwood 's own beliefs of female independence and placing value on feminine and masculine roles and qualities equally. Harwood grew up with the main female figures in her life being her mother and grandmother, who were both very independent; her

Gwen Harwood’s poetry endures to engage readers through its poetic treatment of loss and consolation. Gwen Harwood’s seemingly ironic simultaneous examination of the personal and the universal is regarded as holding sufficient textual integrity that it has come to resonate with a broad audience and a number of critical perspectives. This is clearly evident within her poems ‘At Mornington’ and ‘A Valediction’, these specific texts have a main focus on motif that once innocence is lost it cannot be reclaimed, and it is only through appreciating the value of what we have lost that we can experience comfort and achieve growth.

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