The poetry of Sylvia Plath is shrouded in a heavy veil of figurative language and is often accompanied by her grief, producing themes of a harrowing darkness throughout many of her poems. In one of her most famous poems, “Daddy,” it is clear that Plath draws upon her own life experiences. Weaving in her deep, explosive, and even despondent emotions into the lines of the poem, Plath creates a familiar framework of grief and bitterness. However, Plath leaves no poem ordinary; the unofficial queen of metaphors, Plath coats “Daddy” with a thick layer of comparisons while simultaneously providing evocative imagery and allusions to the holocaust. With a tone of bitterness and the use of extensive figurative language, Plath creates a potent piece full of raw emotion and resentment. …show more content…
While “Daddy,” can work as a stand alone poem, knowing about Plath’s life can deepen the effect and provide an understanding of why the poem is heavily masked with such an abrasive tone of discordant hatred. In “Spluttering Plath,” Sexton notes that, “The decisive event in Plath’s life was the death of her father, Otto, when she was eight.” The death of her father sent her spiraling into a fathomless depression that left an incessant overcast on the rest of her life. As said by Sexton, “[Plath] both hated her father for dying and longed to join him in death.” Eventually, when she was twenty-one, Plath attempted to reunite with her father through committing suicide, but did not succeed. However, even with the numerous similarities between the poem and Plath’s life, the speaker of the poem is different from Plath herself; Plath employs the use of exaggeration and creates big, hyperbolized characters for the sake of poetry, but still utilizes her own
Sylvia Plath’s “Mirror” and Gwen Harwood’s “ In the Park” efficiently explore the idea of identity. Plath’s free verse poem explores the struggle with identity as a woman ages, whilst Harwood’s sonnet unpacks the internal impasse with identity as a woman fights through motherhood. At commencement of poems, both authors use various techniques to introduce the idea. Plath begins her poem with riddle-like verses, insinuating the metaphor of a mirror being “silver and exact” with “no preconceptions”, symbolising the external self of an individual.
Plath’s words are used to try to convey her feelings of being imprisoned and locked away in her life. Both to her deceased father whose death she never really recovered from and also how she felt trapped at the time to her husband that had been unfaithful to her with an affair. Her feelings of her husband can be seen in this passage from Daddy. If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two-
In Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz” and Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” both Poets have characters that are telling of their relationship or some kind of interaction the character had with their father. These poems are similar in some ways, but different in some ways. Regardless they both tell of a child and their relationship with their father. However the major difference between the two poems is Daddy is about Plath’s mother not her father; however this has no impact on the differences between the father child relationships in the poem. Both poets view their fathers differently in each of their poems.
The conflicting interests of the mother and the father result in a situation where one must make a sacrifice in order to preserve the connection in the family. The flat depressed tone of the poem reflects the mother’s unhappiness and frustration about having to constantly
“Daddy” by Sylvia Plath is a daughter’s overdue words to her dead father. As a vessel for the speaker’s emotional outbreak, the poem alternates among her idolation and fear, and her love and rejection for him, feelings that she constantly struggles between. The work reveals the destructive nature of the memory of the speaker’s father, and portrays her final attempt to break free of its shadow. The poem is one big apostrophe directed at the speaker’s dead father, and in doing so she regresses into her childhood self.
A child leaves in the morning to work endlessly until midnight. She arrives home with work-torn hands and tired eyes as she prepares for another day of weaving, spinning, sewing, braiding, and knitting. This image of a child having her life toiled away in a factory is one that Florence Kelley does not tolerate. In her speech for the National American Woman Suffrage Association, she opposes the unfair and immoral treatment of children in labor. Kelley applies figurative language and pathos in her speech in order to push women to encourage men to vote for strict child labor laws, and to convince women of the need for their suffrage.
“It shall be my work this evening to prove to you that in thus voting, I not only committed no crime, but, instead, simply exercised my rights, guaranteed to me and all United States citizens by the National Constitution, beyond the power of any state to deny. ”(Anthony, 1) is a quote from Susan B. Anthony’s famous “Women’s Rights to the Suffrage” speech that inspired change in our great country. This speech was the most compelling of texts because she used solid evidence to support her claim and she uses many different types of figurative language. The third, fourth, and fifth paragraphs were the most important in her speech. This emphasis on ‘We the people’ and not ‘We the white male citizens’ in her third paragraph leads me to my first point.
The poem, “Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe dramatizes the theme of everlasting love. The use of contrasting diction effectively conveys this message. For example, the speaker states, “That the wind came out of the cloud by night, / Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee” (26-26). Poe uses the wind to represent a disease, such as tuberculosis. In addition, the choice of the words, “chilling” and “killing” and the use of cacophony emphasize Annabel Lee’s death and the effect it had on the speaker.
Every story consists of different elements, such as characters, plotlines, and settings. Nonetheless, many stories portray the same messages or ideas. “My Papa’s Waltz,” by Theodore Roethke, depicts a reckless father who is loved by his child, while “Those Winter Sundays,” by Robert Hayden, depicts a hardworking father whose child is indifferent to him. Though the poems depict exceptionally different childhoods, both contribute to the idea that perceptions of parents alter as one grows into adulthood. Both poems use harsh words and critical tones in order to convey this notion, however in “My Papa’s Waltz,” they signify the recklessness of the father and how the narrator perceives his father as an adult, while in “Those Winter Sundays,” they
“My Father’s Song” describes the close, tender relationship between a father and his son, while “Those Winter Sundays” depicts a more distant, strained relationship between the father and his family. Ortiz’s lively descriptions of pleasant memories, illustrate how the father’s interactions with his son reveal his love and strengthen their relationship. A darker, emotionless tone fills Hayden’s poem as he emphasizes a father’s austere, yet sacrificial love toward his family. These poems both set different examples of how some families choose live out the bond between one
Comparing 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
Through the words reflecting melancholy and sorrow, we can sense the narrator's self destruction due to the death of the woman he loved. As one examines the figurative language of the poem, one finds that its form and
“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).
Even when she realized the reality of her father, she still tries to go back to him. In lines 58-61 “At twenty I tried to die…………… /And they stuck me together with glue” Plath uses imagery to show that even as bad as Hitler, she will always look up to her
‘A Mother In A Refugee Camp’ is a tragic and emotive poem, written by Chinua Achebe. The poet describes the hardship of refugee camps and the difficulty of accepting the death of those you truly care about. The poem exemplifies this struggle by describing the mother’s love for the child through direct description of the “mother’s pride” and her “tenderness for” her son. The word “pride” makes her feelings clear and the use of the comparison to “Madonna and Child” amplifies her tenderness. The poet lists tactile imagery which emphasise the mother’s loving actions, “she had bathed him And rubbed him down with bare palms”.