The poem discusses the funeral of a woman and how she is presented in her funeral as someone people would be more likely to romanticize than what she actually was, perhaps out of a misguided sign of respect. The other more hidden meaning behind the poem is the author's reaction to the women herself and how she is portrayed in almost a spiteful, angry way because of his anger over her wasting her life in gray dullness.…
Sylvia Plath uses the lines 4-9 to compare herself to what they did. “A sort of walking miracle, my skin. / Bright as a Nazi lampshade, / My right foot / A paperweight, / My face a featureless, fine / Jew linen.” She compares her skin to one of their lampshades, and her foot to a paperweight. They reduced her to from a human to inanimate objects. These lines could also suggest that Sylvia Plath is upset with how misogynistic men objectify women. Comparing objectifying women to Nazis and the Holocaust, which were both perpetrated by men, brings out how cruel they can…
As Sylvia continues to climb the tree, it also adopts birdlike qualities. It appears that the tree becomes a bird of prey, restraining Sylvia from reaching the top of the tree; ‘the sharp, dry twigs caught and held her and scratched her like angry talons.’ The anthropomorphism used here unites Sylvia with her surroundings, creating parallels to the Romantic writings of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in their Lyrical Ballads. Sylvia is at one with her environment, and though the tree challenges her, it supports her too; ‘More than all the hawks, and bats, and moths, and even the sweet-voiced thrushes, was the brave, healing heart of the solitary gray-eyed child.’ Gray as a colour is symbolic of Sylvia’s blurring between the world of innocence – white, and the world of experience – black. The gray eyes of Sylvia also closely identify her to the birds with ‘their gray feathers as soft as moths’ and further bind her to the natural world. She sees the hawks flying around the tree, and has an instant connection with them, ‘Sylvia felt as if she too could go flying away among the…
Hughe’s articulate and diversely structured poetry regarding Plath and their association encourages the audience to understand the situations within their relationship from his perspective. Hughe’s poem, ‘Sam’ is his version of Plath’s ‘Whiteness I Remember’ reflecting on the memory of a horse riding incident. A variety of techniques are used throughout the poem creating conflicting textual form, including the use of rhetorical questions, ‘Did you have a helmet? How did you cling on?’Immediately this personalizes the poem as if he is talking to Plath herself. The tone and emotive language during the poem also intensifies Hughe’s sentiment towards Sylvia. Imagery is used frequently throughout the text, and in conjunction with alliteration, ‘that horribly hard swift river’ reinforces the intensity of the situation and involves the audience by allowing them to visually imagine the scene, dramatising the situation from Hughe’s position.…
Hughes’s poetry on the other hand is subjective, and is an expression of his thoughts and feelings about Plath and their relationship. He uses Poetic techniques and language devices to communicate his side of the story. Through the use of personal pronouns, and the repetition of “you” we get the feeling that his poems are speaking directly to Plath, almost conversationally.…
There is two angles or views to this poem: one being a happy fun time with daddy and the second child abuse if taken line by line out of the historical and social context. The first view is seen mainly in the first and last couplet. "But I hung on like death" (line 3) is a simile because of the linking work "like" and simply signifies the child embracing his father. The word "hung" as the connotation of being dependent…
“Elm”, written about her toxic marriage to poet Ted Hughes, mainly focuses on her struggle to recover from her husband’s infidelity. However, much like many of Plath’s other pieces, elements of the poem can be interpreted as referring to her ongoing battle with depression. A prime example of Plath’s writing that can be interpreted in different ways is the line “I am terrified by this dark thing/ That sleeps in me” (“Elm” 31-32). Many choose to interpret this dark thing as her remaining love for her husband. Since the idea of love directly correlates to the overall theme of the poem, this is a popular interpretation of what the “dark thing” is referring to. However, considering Plath’s mental state at the time of writing, it can also be argued that the dark thing “sleeping” inside her is more likely the personification of her depression. Other lines in Sylvia Plath’s “Elm” reference both her heartbreak and her depression at the same time. Plath writes, “I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets”(16). By this, she means that she has had to suffer through the horrific ends of beautiful experiences. The most obvious of these beautiful sunsets that ended tragically is Plath’s marriage to Hughes. This metaphor can apply to more than just her relationship, however. It can also be applied to her life. Plath’s early life was, for…
The fifth stanza shows the mother preparing her daughter for Sunday school, and gives us a better understanding of how young the girl really is. The poem describes white shoes on her feet and white gloves on her “small brown hands.” This physical description demonstrates the daughter’s purity and youth, which heightens the emotional impact of her…
One can see that they had a huge impact on who Sylvia Plath was as a writer. “Sylvia Plath’s most famous poem, adored by many sons and daughters, is “Daddy”. It is a poem with an affecting theme, the feelings of the speaker as she regathers pain of her father’s premature death and her persuasion that has betrayed her by dying.” (Howe 1055). Sylvia Plath’s father died at a very young age, she was only eight years old. She always viewed her father as a strict man. Plath even compared her father to a Nazi. (“Panzer-man, panzer-man, O’ You”). This poem is a reflection of how Sylvia feels towards her father and the anger she has for him dying so young. “Sylvia Plath tries to enlarge upon the personal plight, give meaning to the personal outcry, by fancying the girl as victim of a Nazi father: “An engine, an engine / Chuffing me off like a Jew. . . .” ( Howe…
Birthday letters is a set of poems, said to have been written by Hughes for six years prior to his death, on his ex wife’s birthday each year this the selection of poems being called birthday letters. The selection on poems surrounds his problematic marital issues between himself and his wife Sylvia Plath. It is also to show the conflicting perspective on their relationship. This is mainly towards the criticism he received all those years after her suicide. He had been blamed for being the catalyst for her suicide/death and so began a collection of poems regarding their relationship but in some way, excusing himself and explaining that she was already on a destructive path.…
Sylvia Plath poetry is unique because of her use of language and the perspective and themes she explores, creating powerful images and original metaphorical ideas to evoke a strong climax of feelings which express the struggles she experienced in her own personal life. Her poems ‘Lady Lazarus’ and ‘Daddy’ are confessional poems that use contemporary form and respectively a childlike and mocking tone to convey the persona’s mixed sense of emotions . Plath’s poetry utilises unique language to express her anger, hope, desire and disappointment. There is a constant suicidal motif in her poems revealing her personal issues and problems which are linked to male domination in the patriarchal society she resided in. It is unusual that Plath’s poetry is written in a strong female perspective contrary to the passive domesticity which women were meant to abide by in her 1950’s and 1960’s context.…
My analysis of the poem and what it means to me is that in the first stanza I think it is about a father when he comes back home and he has been drinking, and then starts to dance with his son and they were doing the waltz dance. In the seconded stanza it shows what the mother’s point of view and focus is that she does not like what she is seeing that they are causing so much commotion the pots and pans are falling off the shelf. In the third stanza it states that his father has an injury on his knuckle, and every time his father misses a step the son’s ear hits his belt buckle. In the fourth stanza it talks about how his hands are dirty so he must have a tough job and then the danced to the sons bed and then when put to bed the son holds on to his father’s shirt because he doesn’t want to go to bed he wants to keep playing.…
In “Daddy” By Sylvia Plath the young girl is expressing her love hate relationship with her deceased father. The father is abusive towards the narrator in the poem never really paid any attention to her. The young girl shows hate towards her father because she never has the chance to get to know her father because he died when she was seven years old.…
1) De Nervaux, L. (2007). The Freudian Muse: Psychoanalysis and the problem of self-revelation in Sylvia Plath’s “daddy” and “medusa”. E-Rea : Revue Électronique D’Études Sur Le Monde Anglophone, (1). Retrieved from: http://erea.revues.org/186…
First of all, in this story, the main character Sylvia was born and grew up in the city and moved from the city to the countryside to live with her grandmother. This little girl was young and lovely; she had passion with everything with nature. “The good woman suspected that Sylvia loitered occasionally on her own account;…