Use of Imagery in Daddy by Sylvia Plath Essay -- Poetry Analysis

As a modern female poet, Sylvia Plath played many roles in her art: she was the fragile feminist, the confessional writer, the literary innovator. As a woman, Plath found herself with one foot in her past and the other in an uncertain future, her present an often uncomfortable combination of the two. She was at once a daughter desperate to make her parents proud and a wife eager to please her husband; an overworked, depressed teenager and a lonely, sick mother; a child who lost her father and an adult who lost her hope. Plath’s confusion between her memories and her fantasies produced the creative inspiration that spawned much of her work; the losses she suffered had the same effect. The death of her father became a theme in her poetry on which Plath would often spin her words. In the poem â€Å"Daddy,† Plath uses imagery to compare her father to a shoe, God and a vampire, to establish similarities between her father and her husband and to describe the lack of communica tion between her and her father. â€Å"You do not do, you do not do/Anymore, black shoe,† proclaims Plath in the opening lines of â€Å"Daddy† (222), introducing the world to her father, ominous in the color black and consistent in his inability to â€Å"do† anything for Plath â€Å"anymore.† This depiction of the father as an shoe instead of a man also presents Plath’s deft use of imagery to color the character of her father, this time with the shade of a black shoe. This image makes the father sound â€Å"stifling† (â€Å"Slayer† 1). The imagery of the black shoe is also powerful in explaining the nature of Plath’s posthumous relationship with her father. Shoes usually protect the foot, provide warmth for it (Goelzhaeuser 1). Shoes in the poem, however, do not invoke the sheltering, caring ... ...ountry. However, it seems likely that she died as she lived, haunted by a combination of the two, her deceased father pointing out her failures from far away in her childhood and her substitute husband becoming another one of those failures from another woman’s apartment. The imagery of â€Å"Daddy,† of her father and her husband, each her protector and her abuser in one, stands a testament of words to just that. Works Cited Barnard, Caroline King. Sylvia Plath. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978. Goelzhauser, Nicola. â€Å"Imagery in Sylvia Plath’s ‘Daddy.’† Online. http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Studios/8984/daddy.htm. â€Å"Oedipus Complex.† Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. 10th ed. 1993. Plath, Sylvia. The Collected Poems. Ed. Ted Hughes. NewYork: Harper Perennial, 1972. â€Å"Sylvia the Vampire Slayer.† Online. http://members.aol.com/raisans/plath.htm. Use of Imagery in Daddy by Sylvia Plath Essay -- Poetry Analysis As a modern female poet, Sylvia Plath played many roles in her art: she was the fragile feminist, the confessional writer, the literary innovator. As a woman, Plath found herself with one foot in her past and the other in an uncertain future, her present an often uncomfortable combination of the two. She was at once a daughter desperate to make her parents proud and a wife eager to please her husband; an overworked, depressed teenager and a lonely, sick mother; a child who lost her father and an adult who lost her hope. Plath’s confusion between her memories and her fantasies produced the creative inspiration that spawned much of her work; the losses she suffered had the same effect. The death of her father became a theme in her poetry on which Plath would often spin her words. In the poem â€Å"Daddy,† Plath uses imagery to compare her father to a shoe, God and a vampire, to establish similarities between her father and her husband and to describe the lack of communica tion between her and her father. â€Å"You do not do, you do not do/Anymore, black shoe,† proclaims Plath in the opening lines of â€Å"Daddy† (222), introducing the world to her father, ominous in the color black and consistent in his inability to â€Å"do† anything for Plath â€Å"anymore.† This depiction of the father as an shoe instead of a man also presents Plath’s deft use of imagery to color the character of her father, this time with the shade of a black shoe. This image makes the father sound â€Å"stifling† (â€Å"Slayer† 1). The imagery of the black shoe is also powerful in explaining the nature of Plath’s posthumous relationship with her father. Shoes usually protect the foot, provide warmth for it (Goelzhaeuser 1). Shoes in the poem, however, do not invoke the sheltering, caring ... ...ountry. However, it seems likely that she died as she lived, haunted by a combination of the two, her deceased father pointing out her failures from far away in her childhood and her substitute husband becoming another one of those failures from another woman’s apartment. The imagery of â€Å"Daddy,† of her father and her husband, each her protector and her abuser in one, stands a testament of words to just that. Works Cited Barnard, Caroline King. Sylvia Plath. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978. Goelzhauser, Nicola. â€Å"Imagery in Sylvia Plath’s ‘Daddy.’† Online. http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Studios/8984/daddy.htm. â€Å"Oedipus Complex.† Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. 10th ed. 1993. Plath, Sylvia. The Collected Poems. Ed. Ted Hughes. NewYork: Harper Perennial, 1972. â€Å"Sylvia the Vampire Slayer.† Online. http://members.aol.com/raisans/plath.htm.