Daddy Poem Analysis

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Mention can be made to what has been remarked by Helen McNeil in this connection:

“Daddy operates by generating a duplicate of Plath’s presumed psychic state in the reader, so that we re-experience her grief, rage, masochism, and revenge, whether or not these fit the ‘facts.’”

The daughter speaker considers daddy a devil as he divided her pretty heart into two parts. She says that she was only ten years old when he died and people buried him. When she became twenty, she tried to kill herself so that she may get back to him. She thought that after her death even her bones would be contended to meet him. The father and daughter are irrevocable, irreparably and forever separated in his death. The daughter speaker can not get back, back, back …show more content…

Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

In the conclusion of this discussion, it can be said that in the present poem, there is the revelation of an infant who has not grown up and is now craving for that state, her mind with conflicting emotions have always tried to dominate her body. This poem is a self-centered poem. The self is the subject whose sensations make up the poem. The poetess herself refers ‘Daddy’ as an allegory. There is a curious mixture of nursery rhymes with similes and metaphors. But, death seems to be the main theme. As a matter of fact, Sylvia Plath’s attitude towards that ‘half-love’ for easeful death always remained with her. The more she wrote about death, the stronger and more fertile her imaginative world became. In fact she has made poetry and death inseparable. Her poetry bears the theme of death. The images in the poems of Sylvia Plath are associated with death. She is the poet of suicide. Her ‘self’ plunges into darkness. It may be a prelude to her death. It may be a means for her to her to gain vivid and intense existence. The transformation of death into life follows the three parts – structure – enters into darkness, ritual death and rebirth. The poem ‘Daddy’ has the theme of death. In her poems Sylvia either hints at the death of her or refers to the death of others. The death theme is recurrent in the poetry of Sylvia Plath. She was in love with death in her life. So she embraced death by committing suicide.

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