Thursday, May 21, 2009

Daddy

Sylvia Plath's poem, Daddy, is artistic, yet slightly crazy.  She concentrates on her father's actual death, he died when she was only eight years old, and turns it into a mythological figure, Hitler.  In one brief poem, Plath quickly summarizes her personal life and adds her own twists and turns, emphasizing her developed dis-like of men.

The first attacked man is her father.  She has no real memories of him and therefore she develops her own.  In doing so she dresses her father up as a Hitler like character.  She also makes herself a Jew and a gypsy, two groups Hated by Hitler.  It can be implied that Plath believed her father to hate her because he left. 

The poem goes on to mention Plath's attempted suicide when he was in college: "I was ten when they buried you.  At twenty I tried to die and get back, back, back to you" (57-59).  Plath however survivors her suicide attempt and in the future gets married.  Her marriage only lasted seven years however, as written in the poem,

If I've killed on man, I've killed two--

The vampire who said he was you

And drank my blood for a year,

Seven years, if you want to know (71-74)

Plath's poem is written about the real and the mythological.  I wonder whether or not she actually knew the difference?

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