A parent’s word or actions leave behind an astounding effect on a child. Whether positive or negative, those are moments that shape and alter the child’s life. In Sylvia Plath’s poem Daddy, the story tells how the narrator copes and continues her life after her father dies. Even after his harsh treatment and rude demeanor while he was alive, he is still an entity that she herself lives her life by. Plath conveys the narrator’s feeling of confinement with the use of metaphors, repetition, and allusion throughout the poem. The use of metaphors throughout the poem shows the reader how much Plath feels trapped by her own father. For example, in the beginning, stanza, Sylvia describes her father as a big black shoe and her, a white small foot
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In the fourth stanza, as she describes a Polish town destroyed in by the Germans, she repeats how the towns flattened by “wars, wars, wars”. She repeats the word wars, leaving the audience feeling the sheer magnitude of the multiple wars as they pass throughout this town. This town becomes an allusion to not only be one of the many towns the Nazis passed through during World War II but as a discreet reference to the poet herself, feeling as though her emotional psyche was being constantly being flattened by her father’s words. She continues to use repetition as a means to show how struggled to talk and understand her father. In the sixth stanza, Plath describes how she could never talk to her father because her tongue could never let a word come out. When she tries to talk to him in German, she finds herself stuttering saying the word Ich, which means I in German, never being able to finish her sentence. This repetition shows how nervous and scared the narrator would be in her father’s presence which never allowed her to open up her feelings for her …show more content…
The suppression and confinement Plath displays throughout the poem with the simple repentance of simple words and phrases to emotionally provoking comparisons leaves the audience with a deeper understanding of why the main character’s views the world the way she does. The narrator is so emotionally and psychologically damaged by her own father that she is never able to gain security within
In the fourth stanza, as she describes a Polish town destroyed in by the Germans, she repeats how the towns flattened by “wars, wars, wars”. She repeats the word wars, leaving the audience feeling the sheer magnitude of the multiple wars as they pass throughout this town. This town becomes an allusion to not only be one of the many towns the Nazis passed through during World War II but as a discreet reference to the poet herself, feeling as though her emotional psyche was being constantly being flattened by her father’s words. She continues to use repetition as a means to show how struggled to talk and understand her father. In the sixth stanza, Plath describes how she could never talk to her father because her tongue could never let a word come out. When she tries to talk to him in German, she finds herself stuttering saying the word Ich, which means I in German, never being able to finish her sentence. This repetition shows how nervous and scared the narrator would be in her father’s presence which never allowed her to open up her feelings for her …show more content…
The suppression and confinement Plath displays throughout the poem with the simple repentance of simple words and phrases to emotionally provoking comparisons leaves the audience with a deeper understanding of why the main character’s views the world the way she does. The narrator is so emotionally and psychologically damaged by her own father that she is never able to gain security within