Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” and Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz” are similar because they focus on the same subject. However, they differ in how the speakers’ feel about their relationship with their parent(s). In Plath’s “Daddy”, the speaker is a daughter thinking about how her father treated her. She tells about how she felt trapped by him and how she tried to ‘kill’ him, line 6 of the poem, but he dies before she has a chance. The ending of Plath’s poem implies that she got married to a man like her father.
In the poem “forgiving my father”, Lucille Clifton writes of a young daughter reminiscing about her father’s recent death. The daughter talks about it being Friday, it being payday. She discusses her father and how he owed her and her dead mother money when really they just wanted him to be present. The daughter feels she has had no time with her father and she resents him for it. He was not present in her life and now he has passed away, leaving her with a yearning for something that she will never obtain.
The poem “Daddy” is about a women whose father died when she was a very young age. She then goes on to saying that she killed him even though she didn’t. She tried to get back to her father even if he was died. She tried to commit suicide but every time she tried they stop her. She then goes to find someone else to replace her father in her life.
In “My Father’s Love Letters”, the father “asks [his] child to write a letter” as he dictates what to say (line 3). Writing these letters is a way for the speaker and his father to bond. It is one way for the child to learn what love is even though his father is abusive. Although, the child himself may have also been abused, as at one point they sat “in the quiet brutality” (line 19). But, the writing of the letters seems give a powerful sense that the father does somehow love his child as he asks him to write them.
In ‘Daddy’ by Sylvia Plath and The Bee King ‘by Ted Hughes, both poets create and build oppressive and icy imagery around a discourse of entrapment and captivity. Whilst Plath expresses a perception of the world that is underpinned by regret and let down, apprehension and anxiety, but perhaps finally freedom, Hughes expresses that same confused sense of regret and let down, apprehension and anxiety but without a final coming to terms or fixing of the problem. Both poets use twisted paternal images provoking unease in the reader. In both poems, the ports construct images of a father but one, which is in contrast to the reader’s expectation, as we believe a father to be protective, defensive and caring. Instead we are treated to images of neglect,
In the 'Mother to son' poem, Hughes uses symbolism and imagery to convey the meaning of life and prove what it means to move forward and not give up in the political and social identity of this world called America. The anonymous mother is the main speaker in this poem, who gives a powerful statement, "Life for me ain't been no crystal stair (Hughes, 1922)." She stated this in the beginning and at the end of the poem to allow the readers as well as her son to believe that, life is filled with different obstacles and can never be an easy journey to success. People are forcing themselves to give up based on a negative impact, but the speaker is telling them, to keep moving forward; Always stay positive. Readers know this because, she expresses, "It's had tacks in it/ And
While “For My Daughter”, a poem written by Weldon Kees during the 1940s, resonates the bitterness of a mother’s feeling toward her daughter’s illness, it also shows her hopelessness and pain as a mother. What I find interesting about this poem is the strong statement in the last line “I have no daughter” for “I have none”. I find this line to be contradicting, because the mother obviously show hopelessness as she could only watch her daughter slowly dying away. However, she might not bare any love for her daughter or she did love her daughter, but she tries to detach herself from loving her daughter to reduce the pain of losing her. So, I chose this poem to find out if bitterness is the only attitude the poet reveals in this poem.
Next, we must summarize “Forgiving my Father” by Lucille Clifton, to discover the similarities between it and “My Papa’s Waltz”. In the poem we discover that the narrator's parents died and that she was haunted by several heated arguments between her parents over their finances. We get the sense that the daughter seems to be on her mother’s side as she used words like “old liar” and “old dead man” to describe her father. The daughter felt angry and hostile towards her father because she was put in the middle of a difficult marital relationship and felt responsible for their money problems. She realized that her father was “the son of a needy father” (Clifton, 13).
Many condemn the father in the poem for allegedly inflicting pain upon the young boy. A second group thinks that the poem is simply an elegiac tribute of a son to his father and denotes playfulness and love between the father and his
“Poem for My Sister” written by Liz Lochhead, is a poem describing the relationship between two sisters and their experiences. As with almost all siblings, the younger sister looks up to her older sister and strives to be like her whereas the older sister in this poem has been through numerous hardships and troubles in her life and warns her stubborn sister to not follow in her footsteps. The reader can relate to the poem as they are either an adult or a child and both ages apprehend the feelings and emotions that the characters are experiencing. A deeper meaning this poem suggests is that the experience of adulthood should be seen as advice for the upcoming generations. The poet has shown how easily influenced children are and how they strive to be like their elders by using shoes as a representation and symbol for different lifestyles.