As a poet Sylvia Plath has been renowned for her style of writing and the power
she evokes from her ideas in her poems. The themes of her poems tend to be of a
negative nature with war, death and the problem of patriarchal societies as such
topics. One of Plath's most famous pieces of poetry is Daddy. The poem focuses
on Plath's father, a man who left her at an early age resulting in a burning
hatred on her behalf for him. Daddy is an example of Plath's dark and gloomy
work and also displays her common poetic devices of vivid imagery, metaphors,
similes and irregularity throughout her poems. Ideally everybody deserves to
grow up with two living parents, however Plath was not given this opportunity as
her father died when she was only eight. In the poem Daddy, Plath, as the
speaker, is having a one-way conversation with her father expressing all her
feelings, anguish and how she tried to compensate for his death. The poem itself
bares no metaphorical reading, only a literal reading which is broken up into
three parts. A common technique that Plath uses in her poetry is the metaphor.
An example lies within the first stanza of Daddy. “Any more, black shoe, In
which I have lived like a foot, For thirty years, poor and white, Barely daring
to breathe or Achoo.” Here the persona uses the simile "like a foot"
to compare herself to a foot. Metaphorically she is describing how she has had
to live her life without her father, entrapped in black sadness like how a foot
is tightly enclosed within a shoe. The reader is positioned to see that life can
become very grim growing up without an important figure in a person's life such
as their father. The second part of Daddy deals with World War II, a prominent
event in recent history, but was a negative one as it was filled with
destruction, bloodshed and trauma. Firstly to set the scene vivid imagery is
used. The phrases "It stuck in a barb wire snare" and " A Jew to
Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen" paints the picture of the notorious
concentration camps of death with barb wire surrounding it. Another example of
war imagery is when the persona refers to "Panzer-man, panzer-man, O
You-." These soldiers of the German army were one of the most feared, as
they were the men who drove the tanks. Finally the line "So black no sky
could squeak through" sums up the overall atmosphere of a war with its dark
and gloomy nature. With this example of Plath's use of imagery, she has been
able to develop a picture of war and its horrific nature. As a race, the Jews
arguably went through the most suffering in World War II. Millions fell victim
to an attempt of ethnic cleansing ordered by Hitler. However Plath believed her
suffering from the loss of her father was just as great as what many Jewish
people went through. In the poem the persona uses several similes, a common
technique of Plath, in the seventh stanza. “An engine, an engine, chuffing me
off like a Jew. A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen. I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.” The similes within this stanza position the
reader to see the great degree of suffering the speaker went through, as it is
compared to the torment and anguish millions went through during World War II.
When the persona describes her father, she again draws upon war imagery in the
form of the Nazi soldiers and Hitler himself. The description given is in the
ninth stanza. I have always been scared of you, With your Luftwaffe, your
gobbledygoo. And your neat moustache and your Aryan eye, bright blue. By
comparing her father to Hitler, the speaker creates a parallel in that Hitler
was responsible for the lives of so many Jews. Her father is like Hitler and she
is like Jew, hence positioning the reader to see how the speaker believed it was
growing up without a father that caused her to live such a disruptive life. As
it is documented, Plath was known to have lived a life of utter misery, one that
included suicide attempts and breakdowns for which the major reason she put
behind these was the loss of her father. For her mental illness, Plath received
treatment, which included electro-shock therapy. She describes her treatment in
Daddy with another metaphor. “But they pulled me out of the sack, and they
stuck me together with glue. This metaphor positions the reader to see that
although the persona was treated, she was still in a fragile state of mind, one
that was only being held together by a weak bond, something as weak as glue.
During these contemporary times, the patriarchal society can be thought of as
non-existent, however males still have a slight dominance. Although in the era
Plath lived in, male dominance was the norm and she criticized society for this.
In the poem, the persona describes her husband as "A man in black with a
Meinkampf look." This reference to Hitler when describing her husband sets
up a parallel likened to the one between her father and Hitler positioning the
reader to see how the two significant men in the persona's life led to her
downfall. This is further reinforced with the lines "The vampire who said
he was you and drank my blood for a year." Metaphorically the persona
describes how her life was being drained away as a result of a marriage, similar
to that of how a vampire drinks the blood of their victims. It is evident that
Plath fell victim to the patriarchal society with the two dominant males in her
life making life a hell for her as she had to reject both of them saying
"I've killed one man, I've killed two." The persona positions the
reader to condemn the notion of the patriarchal society as it is damaging to
females who have fallen victim under a male dominance. Daddy is indeed a
negative poem, one of many dark poems Plath has written. Never the less there is
a great amount of power within the poem, a power from which Plath's feelings of
her father have been expressed and one that condemns the patriarchal society.
From her use of vivid imagery, metaphors, similes as major poetic devices, Plath
has been able to evoke her ideas to readers worldwide.