Daddy By Sylvia Plath Summary
Decades after her father’s death, the speaker of Daddy by Sylvia Plath still couldn’t make peace with the image of him, which leaves many to question the nature of their relationship. As a vessel for the speaker’s emotional outbreak, the poem alternates among her idolation and fear, and her love and rejection for her father, feelings that she constantly struggle between. Thus, the speaker reveals her past admiration and obedience towards her father, but also her lack of an emotional bond with him, something that would later prove detrimental to her life.
Daddy is a dominant, greater-than-life figure that the speaker admired and adored. In the second stanza, she describes his dead body as as “Marble-heavy, a bag full of God”. This godly
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With internal conflicts that will remain forever unsolved with her father’s death, the speaker mentally suffers. With her dependency and admiration of her father’s greatness, she doesn’t know how to exist as anyone other than Daddy’s little girl. The pervasiveness of him doesn’t allow her to shake his image off, since she will be left empty without it. Furthermore, her admiration was also tainted by fear and a lack of emotional connection. It is notable that in this poem, their relationship isn’t characterized by any direct interaction but only her own perception, watching and imitating Daddy from a distance. Thus, there’s a sense of distance, of incompatibility, and a feeling of something lacking in their relationship that torments the speaker. The poem describe her final effort to detach herself from this struggle, which predicts her death. With admiration, fear, dominance, and distance, the relationship between the speaker of Daddy and her father could be like every other family of the twentieth century. However, her father’s abrupt death has revealed its detrimental flaws by leaving her with a lack of an independent personality and decades of mental suffering. Applied universally with regard to the feminist nature of Sylvia Plath’s poetry, this becomes a criticism of the father’s dominance in the family, and a commentary on the significance of a father-daughter
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536 Words | 3 PagesThe subject of “My Papa’s Waltz” poem by Theodore Roethke has spurred passionate academic debate from professors, scholars, and students alike, the imagery, syntax, and diction of the poem clearly support the interpretation that Roethke writes “My Papa’s Waltz ” to describe the fond relationship with his father as a child. It has been argued that If he was being abused that he would have run away when he had the chance, rather, he didn’t want to let go of his father because they both were having fun. The son’s mother was growing due to motherly instinct out of her son’s safety of how crazy they were walzting, but made no attempts at the son and father’s intervention because it wasn’t necessary to interrupt them. Ultimately to describe
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Connotation In My Papa's Waltz
902 Words | 4 PagesThe relationship between father and son is one that is both sacred, yet complex as each side of the relationship faces hardships. This relationship between a son and his role model, a father and his child, is one, has its ups, but one must also know it has downs. In Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz,” Roethke’s use of ambiguity through diction allows room for the audience to interpret the text in a positive or a negative way, representing the relationship between a father and a son, which on the outside can be interpreted in an either positive or a negative way. Roethke’s use of diction creates an element of confusion for the audience of his poem.
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846 Words | 4 PagesComparing and contrasting Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” and Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz”, one finds the two poems are similar with their themes of abuse, yet contrasting with how the themes are portrayed. Furthermore, the speaker 's feelings toward their fathers’ in each poem contrast. One speaker was hurt by the father and the other speaker was indifferent about how he was treated by his father. The fathers’ feelings toward the children are also different despite how each treated the child. Both poems accurately portray the parent-child relationships within an abusive home, even if they have different
Analysis Of My Papas Waltz By Theodore Roethke
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664 Words | 3 PagesIn the poem, “My Papa’s Waltz”, Theodore Roethke illustrates the complex relationship between a little boy and his father by juxtaposing images of love and violence through word choices that portray feelings of fear yet affection for his father. Roethke’s shifting tone encompasses distress and a sense admiration that suggests the complexities of violence both physically and emotionally for the undercurrents of his father and son relationship. The poem begins with a series of negative images, each of which are considered violent and undesirable in a family. For example, “The whiskey on your breath” suggests alcoholism, and “Could make a small boy dizzy” emphasizes that a boy is suffering from the effects of the alcoholic parent.
Traumatic Events In Sylvia Plath's Life
2095 Words | 9 Pages“Daddy” reflects two completely different time periods in Plath’s life. The first age it reflects is her youth, particularly right after her father died. She confesses in an interview that her life was “sealed off after the age of seven and that her adolescence was not too happy, causing her to become introverted and to write diary poems between the ages of nine and sixteen” (Butscher 14). Her father’s death was the reason behind many of the poems she wrote, often serving as her muse (Rietz 418). This traumatic event appears in Plath’s poetry as an end to her wholeness and her perfect childhood (Kroll 1).
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