The poem "Daddy" thus chronicles a personal misery that is shared by all of Europe, bleeding its collective wounds of guilt at the end of World War II. This sense of the personal and the impersonal becoming melded into poetry is what gives "Daddy" its power. Everyone, not just everyone with a personal, historical family connection to the Holocaust can understand the speaker. She is everywoman, and perhaps everyone who has had a self-defeating, masochistic relationship with someone in the present, because she or he is still emotionally living in the past, replaying an old childhood drama.
Plath's complicated relationship with parenting, and her inability to fully trust or inhabit a healthy relationship is also seen in "Morning Song," which depicts a mother rising to comfort a crying baby. Unlike the relationship of "Daddy," the mother and child seem to have a normal bond -- the mother wakes to comfort the baby, but inside the mother's heart, a tempest is brewing. Plath's speaker articulates what many women feel, but do not say, namely that they resent the child who now burdens them and inhibits their freedom. The mother, still suffering from postpartum depression, thinks: "I'm no more your mother/Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow / Effacement at the wind's hand."
The mother's voice echoes the daughter in "The Moon and the Yew Tree:" the moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary. / Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls. / How I would like to believe in tenderness - / the face of the effigy, gentled by candles, / Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes." But there is a disconnection between the image and the real, how parents should be and how they are. Even readers with less boldness than Plath understand such longing -- mothers wish to be...
Sylvia Plath: A Brilliant but Tortured 20th Century American Poet One of America's best known twentieth century poets, Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) lived an artistically productive but tragic life, and committed suicide in 1963 while separated from her husband, the British poet Ted Hughes. Before her death at age 30, Sylvia Plath had suffered a bout of severe depression for several months, the likely result of her separation from Ted Hughes and
Sylvia Plath's Daddy Any attempt to interpret a work of literature by a writer as prolific, as pathological, as tormented and as talented as Sylvia Plath requires a good deal of caution. A lot of Path's work is biographical -- one might successfully argue that the vast majority of the work of virtually any author is biographical to a certain extent. For Plath, however, this association between art and life, poetry
Ultimately, Lady Lazarus uses her status as a failed suicide as a source of power, not disempowerment. The haunting words of the end of the tale that she is a woman who eats men like air are meant to underline the fact that despite the fact that the doctors feel that they are the source of her coming to life again and again, there is a strength of spirit within
There were also a few children's books by Sylvia Plath that there publish which include: "The Bed Book" (1976), "The It-Doesn't-Matter'Suit" (1996), "Collected Children's Stories" (2001), and "Mrs. Cherry's Kitchen" (2001). In conclusion, Sylvia Plath is a great American poet, short story writer, novelist, and essayist that provided the world with many great poems, short stories, prose and essays. For most of her short life, she suffered from clinical depression,
The reader must search for the theme of the poem, and only from learning about Plath's own life can ascertain that the subject. Plath's esoteric references are less accessible than Lincoln's musings about suicide, death, and hell. However, both Plath and Lincoln do directly mention death in their poems. Lincoln's narrator mentions in line two of "Suicide's Soliloquy" his "carcass" and then in line three, the "buzzards" that "pick
Sylvia Plath's poem "Tulips," the speaker is a sick woman in bed in hospital. She weaves in and out of a drug-induced sleep, and much of the poem reads like a hallucinogenic stupor. The reader perceives the hospital room through the speaker's eyes, which focus especially on the colors white and red. White represents the peace and calm of snow, winter, nurse's caps, and purity. The red of the
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