Compare And Contrast Sylvia Plath And Those Winter Sundays

The poems “Forgiving My Father” by Lucille Clifton and “Daddy” by Sylvia Plath highlight troubled relationships with the authors’ fathers. While most all family relationships have weakness and strife, the ones discussed in these writings are relationships that continue to haunt the authors many years after their fathers’ deaths. The poems are similar in the authors’ tone, point of view, their use of excuses for their fathers’ behavior, and their fathers’ treatment of the authors’ mothers.

The figurative language in the poem “Daddy” by Sylvia Plath can be used to discover a deeper significant of the poem. By using figurative language throughout the poem such as symbolism, imagery, and wordplay, Plath reveals hidden messages about her relationship with her father. Plath uses symbols of Nazis, vampires, size, and communication to help reveal a message about her dad.

Sylvia Plath uses her poem, Daddy, to express deep emotions toward her father’s life and death. With passionate articulation, she verbally turns over her feelings of rage, abandonment, confusion and grief. Though this work is fraught with ambiguity, a reader can infer Plath’s basic story. Her father was apparently a Nazi soldier killed in World War II while she was young. Her statements about not knowing even remotely where he was while he was in battle, the only photograph she has left of him and how she chose to marry a man that reminded her of him elude to her grief in losing her father and missing his presence. She also expresses a dark anger toward him for his political views and actions

It tends to be the trend for women who have had traumatic childhoods to be attracted to men who epitomize their emptiness felt as children. Women who have had unaffectionate or absent fathers, adulterous husbands or boyfriends, or relatives who molested them seem to become involved in relationships with men who, instead of being the opposite of the “monsters” in their lives, are the exact replicas of these ugly men. Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy” is a perfect example of this unfortunate trend. In this poem, she speaks directly to her dead father and her husband who has been cheating on her, as the poem so indicates.

In the poem “Daddy,” Sylvia Plath describes her true feelings about her deceased father. Throughout the dialogue, the reader can find many instances that illustrate a great feeling of hatred toward the author’s father. She begins by expressing her fears of her father and how he treated her. Subsequently she conveys her outlook on the wars being fought in Germany. She continues by explaining her life since her father and how it has related to him.

A father-child relationship can be a good thing for some people, and problematic for others. There are different types of fathers. There are fathers who are always around their children, who give unconditional love and guidance. Then there are hard-to-please fathers who drain their children with extremely high expectations, leading to a strained relationship. Moreover, there are fathers who cannot handle the responsibilities that come with fatherhood, this type of fathers walk out on the family when the situation gets tough. Many people see their fathers in one way as a child and grow to see them in a whole different light as adults. The richness and complexity of the child and father relationship are the reason many poets write about fatherhood and fathers.

The poem “Daddy” by Sylvia Plath is a revenge poem about her father. Her father died when she was ten and she has been affected by that her whole life. She misses him a lot and she even tried to kill herself to get back to him, “At twenty I tried to die and get back, back, back to you”(Plath). After she had failed at killing herself, Plath says “and then I knew what to do. I made a model of you” (Plath). She had married a man and modeled him after her father. Her husband abused her which did not make it any easier for her. Plath gets her revenge at the end of the poem because she says “if I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two” (Plath). This meant that if she killed her husband then that means she would have killed her father. Plath gets her

Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy,” is about a girl who has lost her father at a young age, and since his death, she cannot stop thinking about him. The speaker appears to be Plath consumed in metaphors that resemble the way she feels about her father and former husband. Plath’s father passed away when she was only eight in the poem she states, “I was ten when they buried you. At twenty I

In Sylvia Plath’s infamous poem, “Daddy,” she gives us insight into the speaker’s relationship with her father. It may be difficult to understand their connection within the first few lines due to the murky, dark tones of the poem. Did the speaker hate her father, or did the speaker love him? After reading, the poem itself could be seen as a cry for help and to finally acknowledge how his death made the speaker feel. The speaker had lived 23 years of her life without her father, spending that time feeling lonely and trapped, confined within the mere eight years of memories she had with him before his passing. The poet created a powerful image of the speaker’s father using heavy metaphors to illustrate his authority and powerful influence. The speaker lashes out at her dead father in what can be called a “hate poem”, presumably because she feels abandoned by him after his death. The speaker remains elusive throughout the poem on whether she is done with his hold over her, or whether she’s finally gotten through to her father’s character and she now understands him. The poet displays the intricacies of a father-daughter relationship and all of its complexities through diction, metaphors, imagery and tone, creating a compelling piece that makes readers wonder whether there was any love involved.

After overviewing the poem “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden, the reader can infer that the speaker is remorseful and sorrowful by using context clues and imagery to understand the theme: “Love, but quiet love can go unnoticed.” Throughout the poem, Hayden uses imagery like in line 3 and 4 “Then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather.” The reader can infer that the father is a dedicated man who spends most of his weekdays working hard to make a living and trying to give the speaker a good life. Hayden also uses imagery in lines 10 to 12 “Speaking indifferently to him, who had driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well.” The speaker talks as though he feels remorseful for not giving more to his father

The poem "Daddy" by Sylvia Plath concludes with the symbolic scene of the speaker killing her vampire father. On an obvious level, this represents Plath's struggle to deal with the haunting influence of her own father who died when she was a little girl. However, as Mary G. DeJong points out, "Now that Plath's work is better known, ‘Daddy' is generally recognized as more than a confession of her personal feelings towards her father" (34-35). In the context of the poem the scene's symbolism becomes ambiguous because mixed in with descriptions of the poet's father are clear references to her husband, who left her for another woman as "Daddy" was being written. The problem for the reader is to figure out what Plath is saying about the connection between the figures of father and husband by tying them together in her poem.

Sylvia Plath is a passionate poet, and her poem Daddy shows a broad range of emotions. She likes to use her writing to let out all her delicate feelings and expresses how she feels in her poem Daddy. This particular poem of hers is somewhat dark and leaves the person who reads this with a sense of hopelessness and misery, the reader questions why the writer feels this way. The speaker of Sylvia Plath's poem "Daddy" depicts that she both loves and dislikes her father.

The whole point of the poem “Daddy” is Sylvia Plath shows her emotions of how drained she felt from losing her father at a young age and how one death affected her whole life. The use of Nazi symbolism is confusing, but plays a huge part in understanding the full meaning of what Plath was portraying. The use of intense imagery shows a story of Plath’s deepest emotions. The story Plath is describing shows the reader her extreme depression and every big moment in her life that hurt her. Consequently, one could describe the poem “Daddy” as a way for Plath to express her most depressive memories in her life.

In this poem, the author Robert Hayden dramatizes the conflict of a father-son relationship, inviting us to recall our past relationships with parents with him. This poem was written so the speaker can reflect on his own life and help the reader connect to him. The opening stanza sets the scene with the speaker telling us about his father’s life on Sundays. Note how the author uses imagery to show his inner feelings of coldness towards his father at time, using words like “blue-black cold” (line 2) and “cracked hands” (line 30).

The poems “Advice to My Son” by J. Peter Meinke and “Daddy” by Sylvia Plath are the closest to polar opposites in regards to father figures. The father in “Advice to My Son” seems to be very loving and concerned about his sons future, while the father in “Daddy” is quite the opposite. Sylvia Plath paints her father in a very evil, overbearing light. Her words ooze with disdain and hate for her father. The juxtaposition of these two poems shine light on the authors personal relationship with their fathers.