Daddy By Sylvia Plath Essay

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The Anger and Resentment of a Daughter in “Daddy” In Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy”, the speaker displays a lot of anger and resentment towards her dead father. The poem “Daddy” has been coined ‘confessional poetry’ as the speaker confesses to her dead father, ranting and blaming him for everything she has been through. Jennifer Dunn says “The poem has acted as confession and therapy, allowing the speaker to address and resolve her anger through a series of metaphors about her relationship with her father”. Sylvia Plath was inspired to write this poem based on personal events that she experienced in her life. Neil Heims says “It is a poem of ‘telling off’, of finally saying what’s on your mind”. Throughout the poem the speaker is conflicted with her anger and moving on from her father’s impact on her.
The speaker’s immense anger comes from the fact that she is hurt. The speaker first portrays how enclosed and frustrated she had felt for a long time. She says “you do not …show more content…
The speaker confesses to attempting suicide. At 20 years old she still feels the loss of her father and sees no other way of reuniting with him other than to kill herself. She says “At twenty I tried to die and get back, back, back to you” (lines 57-58) The repetition of “back to you” is to emphasize on how much she wanted to be reunited with him and the effort she had put in doing so. The speaker’s tone is somewhat vulnerable and child-like. She says “I thought even the bones would do” (line 60), which further emphasized her intense desperation to be with her father again. Marianne Egeland wrote, “In her [Sylvia Plath] writings, breakdown and suicide become almost neutral subjects. She went beyond the edge of the bearable, ‘and in the end, slipped over’”. The speaker says “But they pulled me out of the sack, and they stuck me together with glue” (lines61-62). This refers to the treatment or therapy that was applied to help
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Words 1434 - Pages 6