FREE ESSAY ON DADDY

DADDY

"Daddy"
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.