Sylvia Plath-“Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus”

Sylvia Plath-“Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus”

In Sylvia Plath’s works, “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus”, she uses metaphors and similes to display her life. She often refers to her father and her depression and anger is displayed in both poems. Both poems are considered to be dark and sad. The poems were written prior to her third attempt at suicide. In the poem “Daddy”, Sylvia Plath writes about her father life and death and also about her relationship with her husband. She realizes that her father was very controlling, similar to her husband. In the poem, “Lady Lazarus”, Plath comes back as a Jew among the Nazi’s. This shows her oppression to males in her life.
In Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy”, metaphors and similes are excessively used in order to make her point. A symbol that is used throughout the poem is her father’s foot, which was amputated in World War Two. “Any more, black shoe In which I have lived like a foot”, Plath revels that she feels as if she is a foot while her father is a shoe. This shows that Plath’s father protected her; similar to how a shoe protects a foot, however he also trapped her. In the poem, Sylvia Plath states “A cleft in your chin instead of your foot but no less a devil for that”. This shows that Sylvia Plath considers her father to be the devil. She says “Every woman adores a Fascist, The boot in the face, the brute. Brute heart of a brute like you”. She does this in order to make the readers resent her father. It is made clear that her father was a Nazi and that she felt as if he treated her as i f she was a Jew. This is also shown when she states “An engine, an engine Chuffing me off like a Jew. A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen. I began to talk like a Jew. I think I may well be a Jew.”Plath also refers to her father as Hitler, showing that her father treated her poorly. She feared her father, similarly to how she feared her husband, Ted Hughes. She refers to her husband as a vampire in the poem, “The vampire who said he was you and drank my blood for a year,...

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