Poetry Analysis

“Daddy” by Sylvia Plath

The title of this poem gives us just enough to know what this poem could possibly be about. We as the reader, know that it is going to be something related to a father. The author only giving us one word for the title, leaves room for the poem to go any way. It can imply multiple possibilities. The speaker of this poem is the author instead of a character telling the story. Although it is Sylvia speaking, it seems to be her at a younger age experiencing what and thinking how she does. The speaker addresses her life with her father at a younger age and how it leads her to a path of constant depression.

Sylvia Plath starts this poem off with a mood that is cold, dark, and empty. She has more of a dark imagination and uses this throughout the poem. The speaker suffers from depression after her father passes because she feels as if he left her behind. For example, she says to her father “Daddy, I have had to kill you. You died before I had time.” (Plath, 6-7) Once he passed, she realized how her life is not the same without him, and she feels as if she needs to be back around him again. The only way her her to do this is to die with him. “I was ten when they buried you. At twenty I tried to die; And get back, back, back to you.” (Plath, 61-63) allows the reader to see she was serious, although shortly after, we realized she was saved from this suicide attempt. From these examples, we see her depression never goes away. The mood is mostly steady through the entire poem, although we do see more anger towards the end of the poem instead of sadness.

One large piece of imagery that I noticed to be present in this poem is how Plath uses size to compare her and her father. She describes herself as little, petite, and innocent where she explains her father as someone who is large and immense. One way she describes this is when she says “… black shoe in which I have lived like a food for thirty years, poor and white.” (Plath, 2-4) This shows she feels small and trapped in something as tiny as a shoe and her dad being the shoe shows that metaphorically, he is large enough for her to live in. This makes the reader understand that the speaker is the victim and her daddy is the more scary and intimidating one, bringing us back to how size is part of the imagery in this poem. A theme I caught onto in this poem is gender. I feel like gender also somewhat relates back to size because they both are similar in how we notice them in the poem. For gender, the man is always seen as the superior being and this being an older poem, that’s how things were back then more so than now. This is why the readers see this as the daughter afraid of the father and not the other way around. Men are seen as more large, just like seen before, more angry, aggressive, and strong. Women are seen as more petite, weak, tiny, and quiet. This is exactly how we feel about the relationship of the daughter and father in this poem.

This poem was a strong read with many pieces of imagery, metaphors, and themes throughout it. I enjoyed how the author was the narrator and told her own story. I think her choice of writing free verse made this poem easy to read and clean to understand. I chose this poem to analyze because I enjoyed the story and the length of the poem gave me more interest to be able to analyze!