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Sylvia Plath Daddy

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Relationships can be hard to manage, especially when it comes to family. The poem "Daddy" by Sylvia Plath is about a cynical father who died and left his daughter a wreck. Although the father was a bad man, his daughter thought the world of him. The speaker of the poem hates her father because she wants to be like him even though he was not a good man. At a few different places throughout the poem, the speaker states that her father was anything but a good man. She describes a photo she has of him in front of a blackboard with, "A cleft in your chin instead of your foot/But no less a devil for that, no not" (53-54) which implies that her father had a cleft, much like the cleft foot the devil is commonly pictured with, and it didn't make him any less of a devil due to its improper location. …show more content…

"The vampire who said he was you/And drank my blood for a year,/Seven years, if you want to know." The end of that line sounds like the narrator could be sarcastic, as if her father never had time to listen to her. She talks about how her father broke her heart with all the evil he did, which could have taken time away from her. He died when she was ten, and at age 20 she tried to commit suicide because she wanted to be close to him again that even being in the same coffin would suffice (60-65). The closest she could be to her father alive was by marrying a man who embodies her father, particularly his dark side since it seemed to be all she knew. And she finds a man just so, "A man in black with a Meinkampf look/And a love of the rack and the screw" (65-66). She chooses her husband even though he was bad to make up for lost time; she was young when her father died and didn't get a chance to be with him as long as she

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