Power of Words
Sylvia Plath’s poems were definitely ones I had to read more than once in order to fully understand the meaning behind the text. I believe both of the poems were difficult to analyze and comprehend. Without knowing further details about the author, who also happens to be the narrator, and the war between Germany and the Jews Plath’s poems are just words with no meaning.
At first the poem “Daddy” was confusing but once I read Sylvia Plath’s background and looked up key words I didn’t know the poem makes a little more sense then it did originally. The narrator starts off by announcing that she will no longer deal with living “in a black shoe” (Line 2). Choosing the color black to describe the shoe gives me the impression that her life was one consisting of unhappiness. Then in the following stanza we find out that she is talking about her father. The words “I have had to kill you” makes me jump to the conclusion that she is the one who killed her father but in the next line she states that her father “died before she had time” (Line 6-7). This left me wondering what it was she didn’t have time to do before her father died? I don’t believe she means it as simply as she states, she does not mean she didn’t have time to kill her father herself. So, does she mean she didn’t have time to get to know him or that she didn’t have the time to be the daughter he would of wanted? It’s all-only an unanswered mystery unless you continue to read her poem in its entirety.
I continue to question how the narrator truly feels about her father. She gives mixed emotions and uses both negative and positive descriptions throughout the poem. For example, her words “I used to pray to recover you” in line 14 represents her hope to cure her father from his sickness and make him healthy. But, later on she compares her father to Hitler and continues to talk about the theme of Germany and war with the Jews. The “neat mustache” immediately put the image of Hitler in my head, especially after she previously mentions the fear she had towards her father and his “Luftwaffe,” which is the German word for air force used during WW II. She proceeds with another disapproving detail of her father when mentioning the swastika and the word black in the same stanza. The symbol is a representation of evil, so, the narrator has gone from describing her father as being her God to being a swastika. She even makes it a point to emphasize the color of the swastika: black. This once again gives a dark, evil, mysterious image of the narrators’ father.
The father criticized in this poem is portrayed to great extremes to everything from a Nazi, the devil, and even a vampire in the end. I did notice the word black is continuously repeated and I believe she does this to stress the opinion she has of her father. Although we are first unsure of her feelings, she resolves the issue using multiple similes and metaphors and the reader ultimately discovers her true view in the final stanza when she calls her father a bastard. Her conviction is final. Since she chose to make a number of her stanzas reflect the brutality of the Nazi’s/Germans and Jews and compared her father to Hitler himself, I am curious to know what exactly he did to make her feel so bitter towards him?
I didn’t think much of the phrase “black shoe” in line 2 of the poem “Daddy” by Sylvia Plath when I read the poem. However, after discussing that phrase in class I later realized that it could have been a resemblance to the nursery rhyme “The Old Women Who Live in a Shoe.” You brought up a good point about the color of the shoe being black. Plath could have picked any color, but she picked black. I think the choice of picking a dark color resembles the dark moments in her life. We later find out that the color of the shoe foreshadows some of the dark moments in her life with her father. I also didn’t notice how often Plath used the color black in the poem. The constant repetitiveness makes us think that she didn’t have any happy moments in her life. In fact, the poem states that she tried to kill herself three times. She also makes the connection of the color black to her father by stating “I made a model of you—A man in black with a Meinkampf look.” This connection allows us to think that her father was involved in the dark moments of her life.
ReplyDeleteYou raise a good question in that ‘”does she mean she didn’t have time to get to know him or that she didn’t have the time to be the daughter he would of wanted?”’ I think Plath’s poem meant that she didn’t have the time to get to know him and to be the daughter he wanted. As stated in the poem, Plath’s father died when she was only ten years old. Due to this, I don’t think she got the chance to spend time with him and really get to know him. Our childhood is the place where we grow the most. Our parents have a significant influence upon us during that time. However, Plath only got to spend a couple of years with him and I think she is resentful for it. But I also believe that since he died when she was really young, she never got to show her appreciation towards him by being the best daughter that he could want. Nonetheless, Plath’s poem can be interpreted in numerous ways.