Daddy
Sylvia Plath-Daddy
The poem “Daddy” written by Sylvia Plath depicts unmistakably strong feelings of hatred toward her father. Plath’s employment of literary devices and vocabulary allows us to clearly see her view.
Sylvia Plath uses many poetic devices. She begins by using a simile in the first stanza comparing her life to a foot, which is stuck in a show “…black shoe in which I have lived like a foot.” Just like her father, a shoe prevents a foot from having any freedom. Throughout the poem Sylvia keeps comparing herself to a Jew being shipped off to a concentration camp. Of the three concentration camps that she mentions, Dachau is where the Nazis were trained to run all the camps and where all the killing methods originated, and Auschwitz is where the most deaths took place (over 1,000,000). There are lots of references to Germany during the World War 2 era, and even the use of some German language (ach du, ich). At one point during the poem, her father is described to look like Hitler and everyone in the “perfect society” he hoped to create, “And your neat mustache. And your Aryan eye, bright blue.” Her mention of a swastika (Hitler’s symbol) and Meinkampf (a book written by Hitler), helps to reinforce the fact that she truly felt like she was being treated like all of the Jews locked in concentration camps with barbed wire. When she describes her father as “so black no sky could squeak through,” it shows that nothing could sneak past his strictness. Her father made her life so miserable that she attempted suicide (in this case she was not successful, but in real life she eventually succeeded). When she mentions that the voiced can’t come through on the telephone, it refers to the people in his life no longer being able to get through to him and have an impact. Unfortunately for her, her husband was just like her father, but they both ended up dead. Plath’s use of free verse is really the only freedom that she had in her life. To...
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