How Sylvia Plath's Life is Reflected in the Poems Daddy, Morning Song, and Lady Lazarus

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

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.

In her poem, “Lady Lazarus,” Sylvia Plath uses dark imagery, disturbing diction, and allusions to shameful historical happenings to create a unique and morbid tone that reflects the necessity of life and death. Although the imagery and diction and allusions are all dark and dreary, it seems that the speaker’s attitude towards death is positive. The speaker longs for death, and despises the fact the she is continually raised up out of it.

Sylvia Plath was an American Poet who was renowned for poetry mostly in the United States. She, however lived a difficult and depressing life which led to a few futile suicide attempts, but ultimately led to a successful suicide attempt leaving her children to live on without a mother. This end result was due to a multitude of issues in her life from Sylvia’s sanity. She wasn’t the most stable child. Her marriage also played a role in her suicide. Her successes weren’t acclaimed until after her death, when a majority of her work was released. There were two major aspects to her life: her poetry and her sanity. These three combined make up a majority of Sylvia’s life.

An attempt will be made in this paper to look into the different aspects of her poetry

In Sylvia Plath’s free verse poem, “Daddy,” she describes her hatred towards her deceased father. Plath uses tone, figures of speech, and symbols to illustrate her extreme anger and female protest towards the man that raised her. Sylvia Plath has a dark, bitter tone in “Daddy.” She recalls all the pain that her father has put her through, even after his death.

When children are small, most tend to idolize their parents and think of them almost as gods. However, children slowly start to realize their parents aren’t gods and aren’t as great as they thought they were in some cases. With that, children are able to grow up from the first phase and are able to surpass their parents since they had grown to a point where they had matured dramatically. With this growth, they are finally able to “kill” the image they had of their parents years before and are able to make their own identity. For Sylvia Plath, she wasn’t given the opportunity to surpass her father because he had died early in her life.

Introduction: Conflicting perspectives are different points of view expressed and influenced by ones context and values. “Birthday Letters” by Ted Hughes is an anthology of poems challenging the accusation that he was responsible for his wife, Sylvia Plath’s death. The three poems The Minotaur, Your Paris, and Red are an insight into Hughes justification of the death of Plath using a very subjective and emotive poetic form. The poems possess many deliberate techniques such as extended metaphors, connotations, diction and juxtaposition to encourage the audience to accept his argument that he was not the one to blame for this world renown tragedy. The poem Daddy by Sylvia Plath also displays conflicting perspectives of the

Humor and Sylvia Plath are words not generally heard in the same sentence. Although her poetry is widely read, we as a society tend to associate her writing with the inherent darkness in her words, and we tend to ignore everything else, particularly with regards to the poetry she wrote near the end of her life. The morbidity in her writing is most definitely there, but it is often expressed using humor. I will be examining Plath’s poem Lady Lazarus, and in particular the way that Plath uses humor throughout the poem through her use of sarcasm, hyperbole and absurd comparisons, rhyme, and circus imagery. I will also be looking at the possible reasons why Plath uses humor throughout Lady Lazarus, and what purpose it serves as a literary device.

Wrapped in gaseous mystique, Sylvia Plath’s poetry has haunted enthusiastic readers since immediately after her death in February, 1963. Like her eyes, her words are sharp, apt tools which brand her message on the brains and hearts of her readers. With each reading, she initiates them forever into the shrouded, vestal clan of her own mind. How is the reader to interpret those singeing, singing words? Her work may be read as a lone monument, with no ties to the world she left behind. But in doing so, the reader merely grazes the surface of her rich poetics. Her poetry is largely autobiographical, particularly Ariel and The Bell Jar, and it is from this frame of mind that the reader interprets the work as a

What would you do if you were given a chance to come back and haunt the people who did you wrong in your life? Would you go find the person who made you want to end your life? Or would you realize that every time you rise, you will take revenge on those who prey on the weak and the innocent? But neither are what this poem is about. The poem is about our narrator who rises from the dead to take a stand against our past, and not letting in happen again. In the Poem Lady Lazarus by Sylvia Plath, there is a sense of pain in the words that Plath uses. The poem is very hard to follow when we read it for the first time, we must read it multiple times to see what is going on. Every time we read the poem there are words that stick out that make us feel the pain in the eyes of the haunted woman narrator. Plath is very effective at using diction to make the reader stop and think about what is going on in her poem, using images to create the pain that she is experiencing as well as being able to use symbols to paint a bigger picture for the reader.

Some of the dark negative emotions Sylvia Plath shares in this poem can make anyone have sympathy on her feelings. Especially, when she writes,

Sylvia Plath is often be described as a feminist poet who wrote about the difficulties women faced before women's right were a mainstream idea. The essayist Thomas McClanahan wrote, “ At her brutal best- and Plath is a brutal poet- she taps a source of power that transformers her poetic voice into a raving avenger of womanhood and innocence”. It is quite obvious that Plath's feminism is extremely important to her poetry, but she also wrote about a lot of day to day experiences and made them significant through her use of metaphors and symbolism. Plath may also be best known for her autobiographical poetry written in confessionalist style that appeared during the 1950s. She is considered an important poet of the post-World War II era. She became widely known following her suicide in 1963.  Through Sylvia Plath’s poetry readers are able to explore her life. The particular time and place in which she wrote her poetry, the death of her father, her failed marriage, her battle with depression and others who influenced her all lead to the writing of some of her most cherished works. By aligning the works of Sylvia Plath alongside the events in her life, one is able to get a better understanding of her work and her as a woman in the era that she lived in.

“Her father encouraged her to read and write from a very young age and home tutored her. She spent a great deal of her time in her father’s library which was stocked with works of great writers. She worked hard to fulfil her father’s wishes, and by the time she was twenty-two, she come out with her first collection of poems, ‘A Change of

Sylvia Plath’s Daddy is addressed to the speaker’s father. The speaker describes the father as a looming, unhuman force that stifles her. She introduces him as being the “black shoe / In which I have lived like a foot / For thirty years , poor and white, Barely daring to breathe or Achoo”. Her characterization of him being a looming, oppressive force is further reinforced by her description of him as a “marble-heavy… ghastly statue with one gray toe / Big as a Frisco seal / And a head in the freakish Atlantic.” In her mind, he is a giant statue that stretches across the continent. She also calls him “a bag of God” but, given her negative portrayal of him, saying he is full of God is most likely an indication of his ego and power, not virtue. Plath talks about his appearance, saying there was “a cleft in your chin instead of your foot,” but he is “no less a devil for that,” an allusion to the Satan who is often depicted as having hooves instead of feet. The speaker shows no recognition of her father’s humanness nor moral nuance; he is but an evil force that oppresses her.