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Submitted by Sippy on April 30, 2006
Category: English
Words: 1569 | Pages: 7
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Sylvia Plath's poem "Daddy" and Regina Barreca's poem "Nighttime Fires" are both being told by young women looking back at their early childhood years. Both poems involve the relationship between a father and his child. Plath's poem explores the relationship of a dominating father and his daughter; and her struggle to break free from those memories and the ties that are keeping her bound. Barreca's poem is also about a father and daughter, but more so of the unhealthy deteriorating life of the father.
In Sylvia Plath's poem "Daddy" the reader needs only to read a few lines to understand the speaker's overwhelming feelings of being oppressed by her father and later by other men. Plath writes in the first stanza,
You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white.
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.
Typically speaking the imagery of living like a foot in a shoe would give a sense of protection from the cold, unknown world. But Plath describes the shoe being the color black, connoting death. The frequent use of the word black forces the reader to see that the relationship with the daughter and father is very damaging.
In the second stanza Plath writes " Daddy, I have had to kill you,/ You died before I had time-/ Marble-heavy, a bag full of gold,"(lines6-8) the imagery of marble and gold is that of beauty, expensive and rare. However, in "Daddy"
the connotations are that of heaviness and control. A little later in the poem her father is compared to a German. Plath states in lines 29-30, and "I could hardy speak./I thought every German was you." And then Plath uses this metaphor in the seventh stanza
An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.
The powerful feeling one gets from...
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