An Explication of Sylvia Plath8217s 8220Daddy8221 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.
The first two stanzas, lines 1-10, tell the readers that
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In stanza 12, she tells us that he has “bit her pretty red heart in two.” Next, she states that he died when she was ten, and when she was twenty years old, she attempted suicide - “…I tried to die, to get back back back to you.” In stanza 13 is where she starts talking about her husband. She says that instead of dying, her friends “stuck her together with glue,” and since she could not die to get back to her father, she would marry someone who was similar.
“I made a model of you, a man in black with a Meinkampf look for a love of the rack and the screw. And I said I do, I do.”
These lines are frightening, but unfortunately real. Plath tells us that she has married someone exactly like her father, a man who has a “my struggle” look, a German look. The third line above seems to mean that her husband, who was poet Ted Hughes, cheated on her, in turn abandoning her. But she still said “I do” and agreed to be with him.
The last two stanzas are the darkest, and ultimately appear to put some type of closure on Plath’s life. She obviously believes that she killed her father when she was ten years old, stating that “if I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed
She is realizing that she will have freedom through her husband death and whispers over and over, “free, free, free!” Her unhappiness is not with her husband, it is her rankings in society and becoming a widow is her only chance she has to gain the power, money, respect, and most of all freedom.
This is the message in this poem because in the beginning of this poem they start to talk about how her husband made her go exile. In the article The Wife’s Lament Robert argues, “I suggest that the story told in The Wife's Lament may be derived from a myth about an abandoned fertility goddess or Terra Mater who weeps (like Freyja) for a departed husband or lover, wanders in search of him, and is finally condemned by his withdrawal (like Gerdr) to a lonely, sterile, death-like existence in a primitive, elemental world.” (Luyster) She had to go exile to some where in the middle of nowhere, and she would sit under a tree all day. While she was under the tree she experienced sadness because she wants her husband to come back. As well as the wife wanting her husband coming back she also wanted him to become exiled as well because of what he had done to her. In the poem they state, “may that young man be sad minded always hard his heart’s thought while he must wear a blithe bearing with care in the breast a crowd of sorrows.” (lines 42-45) The author states this in her poem because she wants her husband to feel the sadness that she has been going through for so long. This is a big message in the poem because of the way she just wanted her husband to go away because of what he did to her. Clearly, the message in this poem is that she had to suffer through sadness since her husband left
In these lines the poet conveys how love will kill you, especially when dealing with a toxic relationship. As well as stating that she is scared of catching “the scarf” herself and getting killed by love. By using a simile she compares the tragic car accident that caused the death of dancer Isadora to tainted love. Continuing to clarify we see in stanza five, Plath writes, “One scarf will catch and anchor in the wheel// such yellow sullen smokes// Make their own element. They will not rise” (13-15). You can detect how the love is making her physically sick. The yellow sullen smokes are code for something being unwell. They transfer as a negative sensation. This affects her tremendously, she is so afraid of catching this love scarf, because she knows that the death from it is a slow and painful one.
American poet Sylvia Plath once stated “eternity bores me, I never wanted it.” This quote, from her poem, “Years,” expressed that she did not want to live forever. It even suggested a foreshadowing of her suicide in 1963. This quote is also from one of her many poems, which were greatly influenced by her life. To learn how Plath’s life affected her writing, researchers studied main topics on her life and her works, including her early life, career, and literary works.
American poet Sylvia Plath once said “eternity bores me, I never wanted it.” This quote, from her poem, “Years,” expresses that she did not want to live forever. It might even suggest a foreshadowing of her suicide in 1963. This quote is also from one of her many poems, which are greatly influenced by her life. To learn how Plath’s life affected her writing, researchers study main topics on her life and her works, including her early life, career, and literary works.
Because The Bell Jar is semi-autobiographical, we are given insight into the younger years of Sylvia Plath and have general ideas of how she managed her depression. After numerous suicide attempts, Plath eventually succumbed to her depression and killed herself on February 11th, 1963 at thirty years old. She left behind her forty-poem manuscript of Ariel on her desk, as well as an additional nineteen poems, that her husband later published two years after Plath’s death. Leaving the poems behind allowed for Plath to control the narrative of her life, as the poems from “Ariel” have a noticeable separation between the speaker of the poems, and Sylvia Plath herself.
Sylvia Plath is regarded as one of the best writers in history. She was a very talented poet and also published a semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar. Even though she was successful, her life was full of tragedy. She suffered from mental illness and many personal losses. She used these experience in her work as an outlet for her anguish. She is known as a confessional poet.
In the world of poetry, it is a commonly known fact that Sylvia Plath had a tendency to express her fascination with death and various other extremely dark, heavy, and morbid topics in a myriad of her works. The intensely personal and somewhat taboo topics that are found in her poems can sometimes be tremendously challenging for people to face, but Plath’s supreme writing ability allowed her to write about such subjects in a way that made readers unable to look away from the page. This idea is especially true in her persona poem “Lady Lazarus,” which deals with the morose matter of mental illness and suicide. In this poem, Plath has the speaker, Lady Lazarus, describe her previous and future experiences with death and resurrection. Lady Lazarus is unafraid of and seems to completely embrace death, almost to the point where she takes pleasure in it, and she abhors how her resurrection is made into a theatrical show and a science experiment. For most of the poem, themes of suffering and death are present, but as the poem nears the end, a more positive theme of empowerment arises. To express the speaker’s innermost feelings concerning suffering from oppression and depression, Plath utilizes unique form, unorthodox rhythm and rhyme, and unbelievably violent, gory, and horrific images of death associated with the treatment of Jewish people during the time of the Holocaust, and she does so, spectacularly.
Sylvia Plath is often described as a feminist poet who wrote about the difficulties women faced before women's right were a mainstream idea. From reading her poetry, it is quite obvious that Plath's feminism is extremely important to her, but she also wrote about a lot of day to day experiences and made them significant through her use of literary devices such as metaphors and symbols. Plath may also be best known for her autobiographical poetry written in a confessional style that appeared during the 1950s. She is considered a very important poet of the post-World War II era. She became widely known following her suicide in 1963 (Bawer). Through Sylvia Plath's poetry, readers are able to get a glimpse into her personal life. The
Plath broadens her feelings out to include all women, maybe because there are some who tolerate domestic abuse, or because fascist leaders like Hitler became something of a sex symbol in the states they controlled. Plath can be seen as an early feminist, so this statement can be argued to be ironic. The internal rhyme of ‘boot’ and ‘brute’, repeated 3 times, and the consonant ‘heart’; when read aloud, this sounds as one is spitting with disgust. The last few stanzas of the poem are ambiguous as Plath constantly repeats that she is “through”. It can be inferred that Plath is putting the past behind her and that the poem has feelings of closure towards her father, which makes the overall tone of the poem therapeutic, which makes the poem confessional, unlike the beginning of the poem where it appears the poem is conveying her bitterness. However, the telephone is mentioned as a form of communication. It is unclear whether she is ‘through’ meaning finished with him, or that she’s finally communicated her rejection of
Everyone knows that life is hard. But for some, it’s as if life itself picked them out to labor the worst of what it has to offer. Sylvia Plath was a confessional poet, using her personal experiences and very real situations to give “negative” emotions the artistic charm and characteristics traditionally saved for “positive” emotions. Her father died in her eighth year of life, and although this event tormented her until her own death, time went on. She married Ted Hughes, the two of them encouraging each other’s careers as much as they could, but still there was tension between them. It was when Plath learnt of her husband’s infidelity in the fall of 1962, that her poetry enhanced both in quality and depth. She began writing about her own
Sylvia Plath was born in 1932 in Boston, Massachusetts. She wrote her first poem at the young age of 8 ½. that poem was displayed in The Boston Traveller. When she first began writing, she wrote about general topics, nature, and scenery, but as time went on and with more experience, her poems acclaimed more depth. Plath loved writing, and in an interview with Peter Orr, Plath once said ‘I don 't think I could live without it. It 's like water or bread, or something absolutely essential to me. I find myself absolutely fulfilled when I have written a poem, when I 'm writing one. Having written one, then you fall away very rapidly from having been a poet to becoming a sort of poet in rest, which isn 't the same thing at all. But I think the actual experience of writing a poem is a magnificent one” (The Poet Speaks).
“Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I've a call” (2603). Sylvia Plath was born October 27, 1932, in Boston Massachusetts. She carried herself with a non-apologetic attitude and an obsession with death, so much so that she tried to take her own life on more than one occasion. Her first attempt happened during the summer of her junior year in college. After taking several sleeping pills, she crawled under her mother’s house and was not found until three days later. After some time in a psychiatric hospital, she recovered fully and attained a Fulbright scholarship to Newnham College, Cambridge (“Sylvia Plath,” Famousauthors.org).
Sylvia Plath who is hailed as one of the most renowned and influential poets commit suicide on Monday, February 11, 1963. Many theories arose as this atrocious deed shook the public in multiple ways.
Sylvia Plath, an open minded, free spirited author and poet of a variety of many pieces. All of Plath’s poems are inspired by her personal life and how she viewed it.