The Effective Use Of Metaphor In Silvia Plath's Daddy
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Silvia Plath’s Daddy is a powerful poem conveying a story of how the father had such grand influence on the writers’ life. This poem comes from her emotions, and through it we understand significantly about her own life and decisions. Her father a German professor, died when she was at a young age, leading to her long-life depression. She attempted suicide once but failed, and in 1963 she did end her own life, and this poem was written shortly before that. For someone who does not know anything about her life the strong feelings displayed here give away an autobiographical sense. Through Plath’s use of metaphors and imagery she is able to create an image of his father to demonstrate the damaging effect he had on her life.
Silvia Plath’s use of language is very…show more content… These images help place the reader in a somber setting in which she is at. “Ghastly statue with one gray toe. Big as a Frisco seal” this statue she is describing is signifying her father. The gray toe, as big as a seal, makes reference to when his father’s toe was infected due to a severe case of diabetes. With these next two lines, Plath places an image in our heads of his father physical appearance. “With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygook. And your neat mustache, And your Aryan eye, bright blue.” The Luftwaffe and the Aryan eye is an important part because it is Hitler’s ‘perfect’ race, once again implying that his father was like a Nazi. “You stand at the blackboard, daddy, in the picture I have of you, A cleft in your chin instead of your foot” here the blackboard signifies her father’s job as a professor and how important it was to him. With the description of the neat mustache, the cleft in the chin the reader and the blue eyes we are presented with an image of this big, scary German man. As he describes his father physically, Plath manages to connect it to his character and his close-knit relation to a