Plath’s Powerful use of Imagery and Metaphors

In the poem “Daddy,” the speaker, Sylvia Plath confesses her true feelings about her deceased father. Throughout the poem, many instances illustrate a great feeling of hatred toward Plath’s father. She uses strong imagery and powerful speech to show her attitudes towards her late father and her husband. Plath describes her relationship and feelings of guilt, fear, and pain that her dad’s death had caused her. The tone of this poem is that of an adult engulfed in outrage and who often changes into childlike dialect; this is evident when the speaker continually uses the word “daddy” and also repeats herself often. Plath uses imagery heavily in her poem to express her struggles in life. She casts her father into different metaphors throughout the poem. Her images of her father compared him to God, a Nazi, the Devil, and a vampire. Plath describes her feelings about men and death and how they are related.

Plath’s use of imagery and the style in her poems have intrigued the thoughts of many critics. Her carefully chosen images are analyzed by M.D. Uroff, in his essay “Sylvia Plath and Confessional Poetry: A Reconsideration..” She is skilled at image-makin

Hall, Caroline King Barnard. Sylvia Plath, Revised. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1998.

Plath chose to deal with her experience by creating characters who could not deal with theirs “and through their rituals demonstrate their failure. This poem like the speaker in it, is superbly controlled; but the poet behind the poem uses her immense technical control to manipulate the tone, the rhythm, the rhyme, the pace of the speaker’s language in order to reveal truths about the speaker that the obsessive assertions deny” (Uroff).

compared to the Holocaust emphasized the horrific pain that she was in. Plath comes to realize that no one is perfect, and everyone was going to end up hurting her, and she didn’t want to deal with the pain anymore, so she decided she was going to end it. The poem isn’t

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