Daddy by Sylvia Plath Sylvia Term Paper

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The childhood terror and intimidation caused by the paternal image is illustrated by her association with Nazi persecution of Jews. The rejection of her brutal and life-denying father is opposed to her love and admiration for him: "Bit my pretty red heart in two. / I was ten when they buried you/.At twenty I tried to die / and get back, back, back to you."

The tone of the poem is another important element in the overall lyrical body; it is based on constructing a voice that changes throughout the poem from unpleasant and rebellious to proud to murderous. These shifts in tone generate shift in the general mood of the poem in the sense that she manages to recover long lost feelings of resentment and pain from her childhood and to express them in the context of her state of mind when writing the poem, i.e. during adulthood. It is also relevant to note that the poem was finished at a time of great inner struggle - just months before she committed suicide, which could account for the insistent rhymes and desire to reconstruct her dark painful childhood (Uroff).

The peak of her simple monologue is attained when she says, "Daddy, I have had to kill you," which acts as a kind of realization and acceptance of her mission, i.e. To perform the exorcism ritual of the paternal image that had been haunting her, her entire life.

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Nevertheless, her literary endeavor does not bring her a sense of self-discovery or self-understanding, but reaffirms her need of control over the past. Her literary endeavor does not appear to be logical; what she aims at is personal redemption. The only way for her to control - and maybe even exorcise - her inner evil forces is to transform them into images with the risk of obtaining a rather confusion and terrifying result.

M.D. Uroff, "Sylvia Plath and Confessional Poetry: A Reconsideration." Iowa Review 1977: Vol. 8, No. 1. pp. 104-15. Literature Research Center. Gale Group. http://www.sylviaplath.de/plath/uroff.html

Plath, Sylvia. Daddy. Online text available at: http://www.internal.org/view_poem.phtml?poemID=356

Wagner-Martin, Linda; Stevenson, Anne. "Two Views on Silvia Plath's Life and Career." The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English, 1994. Rpt. In Modern American Poetry. http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/plath/twoviews.htm.....

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