The Role Of Gender Roles From A Young Age And Plath 's Daddy

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.

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.

Throughout literary history, authors have categorized mothers as nurturing, critical, and caring; works of literature characterize fathers, however, as providers who must examples for their children and embrace their protective, “fatherly” instincts. However, many works’ fathers fall short when it comes to acting the role of the ideal dad. Instead of being there for their children, they are away and play very miniscule roles in their children’s lives; instead of protecting he actually ends up hurting their kids. Thus, the paternal literary lens tries to determine whether or not the work’s father figure fits the “perfect father” archetype. This lens questions whether or not the father figure is his children’s active example, provider, and

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.

Plath starts her poem out negatively, ‘barely daring to breathe or Achoo’, with a distinct repetition of the ‘oo’ sounds in ‘Achoo’, ‘do’, ‘shoe’ and ‘du’ creating a childlike, nursery rhyme style of delivery that contrasts greatly with the violent and dark themes. Harwood begins on a significantly more positive if wistful note, ‘forgive me the wisdom I would not learn from you’ positioning her mother as a wise and positive influence. The tones of the poems are very different, as shaped by the poet’s experiences with their parents, with Harwood creating an affirmative, loving description of her relationship with her mother while Plath develops a much darker and sinister view s.

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

In this stylistic analysis of the lost baby poem written by Lucille Clifton I will deal mainly with two aspects of stylistic: derivation and parallelism features present in the poem. However I will first give a general interpretation of the poem to link more easily the stylistic features with the meaning of the poem itself.

her far from herself. In one line in the poem she brings us starkly into the world of a

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.

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

is still yet to be born, but is still in the stages of development in