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An Analysis Of Sylvia Plath's Anatomy Of Daddy

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Anatomy of “Daddy” In the first stanza of Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy”, the speaker says, “You do not do you do not do/ Any more, Black shoe/ in which I have lived like a foot /for thirty years, poor and white,/ Barely daring to breath or achoo”(lines 1-5). The author is generally known to be writing about her father who passed away when she was ten and is describing being locked inside of a personal hell that she has lived in for thirty years. “You do not do” (line 1) means she cannot take it anymore; something has got to change, she cannot continue to live in the hell that is in her head. The pain is so unbearable; she uses the shoe to describe how she feels trapped because of the overwhelming feelings. She describes the foot as white and how it can barely dare to breathe because of the insecurity that she possesses. Each stanza in the poem expresses emotions of anger, abandonment, and insecurity that have crippled her throughout her life. The poem is very intense and very personal to the speaker. In the second stanza she begins to express her anger and hatred to her father. She says, ” Daddy, I have had to kill you, you died before I had time” (lines 6-7). The anger is not directed at the person who her father was, but for the person she had become because he left her at such a young age. The rest of the second stanza and all of the third describes her father as being “a bag full of God” (line 8); this line indicates that she loves him and praises him as if her were a

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