Lucille Clifton's Poem 'Forgiving My Father'

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Both poems describe the connection between the two poets (both named Sylvia Plath and Theodore Roethke) and their fathers and how their relationship is structured. In Daddy, Sylvia talks about how her relationship with her father doesn't seem happy. She strongly hints that her father has done terrible things to her and that

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

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.

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.

Sylvia Plath’s poetry is well known for its deeply personal and emotional subject matter. Much of Plath’s poetry is confessional and divulges the most intimate parts of her psyche whether through metaphor or openly, without creating a persona through which to project her feelings, and through the use of intense imagery. Plath’s attempt to purge herself of the oppressive male figures in her life is one such deeply personal and fundamental theme in her poetry. In her poem, “Daddy”, which declares her hatred for her father and husband, this attempt is expressed through language, structure, and tone. (Perkins, 591)

There are many literary works that have been created by the authors with different types and different genres of literary works. Literary works itself never separated from the elements that contained in it that help to build the story of literary work itself. There are 2 elements in a literary work; intrinsic element and extrinsic element. Intrinsic element itself is elements that make up a work of literature in the form structure are like a literary elements found in the intrinsic elements. Yet, this paper will focus only on intrinsic element especially in a poem.