The Details behind Sylvia’s Plath Daddy Poem
As one reads Sylvia Plath’s poem he or she will learn that Plath has a dysfunctional relationship with her father and husband, as time passes she cannot seem to get over her father’s death, Plath’s grief starts to affect her emotions and she starts to seem to have a love and hate relationship with not just her father and her husband, instead she has a dysfunctional relationship with every man; as a decade and plus pass after Plath’s dead dad, one is able to tell that Plath has a problem with accepting her past.
The diction in this poem such as: “kill” “brute”, “bastard”, and “vampire”; give a clear understanding that the tone of this poem is nothing but hate and resentment. Line 6 states: “Daddy, I have had to kill you You died before I had time—“ ; even though Plath’s dad is deceased she still willing states that if she had a chance she would kill her dad again, and it maybe because her father treated her like a “shoe”. Furthermore, line 54 states: “Brute heart of a brute like you”, Plath is comparing her heart as beastly and her father as being the beast. Plath refers to her dad as the devil in the very last line of the poem, she states “Daddy, Daddy, you bastard, I’m through”; now Plath calling her dad a bastard is not only disrespectful, but gives a clear understanding that Plath and her dad’s relationship was disrespectful, by her also saying he is through means that Plath released a lot of anger by writing this poem.
Understanding the metaphors in this poem will help one comprehend the imagery and symbolism in this poem, Plath gives a pretty detailed image behind her and her dad’s relationship, and also Plath references the Holocaust to symbolize her feelings towards her father.
In the very beginning of the poem Plath states in lines 1-3:
“You do not do, you do not do Any more, black shoe In which I have lived like a foot”
Those first three lines give a legit description of the...