' In this way, Plath uses familiar Nazi imagery as referenced in the poem's middle stanzas to more damningly critique the cultural characteristics of men in a pre-feminist society; torturous, cruel and bellicose. To this man Plath said, 'I do, I do,' the repletion of the oo sound again significant in its contribution to the theme of victimhood and continual patriarchal domination.
Finally, Plath uses aggressive diction to analogise Hughes to 'a vampire', a fairy tale character likely familiar to her audience. In this case, Hughes, the vampire 'who said he was you', is shown to have 'drank my blood for a year/ Seven years if you want to know.' The vampire is used as a familiar metaphor to analogise the sucking of blood by a fictitious character to the draining of energy, personality and identity of women and in particular female poets by their critical husbands and a society constructed to 'let no light squeak through', continuing to metaphorically enslave women to the power of masculine subjugation. In this way, Plath makes significant use of familiar images such as the shoe, a white foot and the father figure to explore the far more complex and unfamiliar notion of patriarchal society and its effect on the women it is structured to oppress.
The construction of such a male oriented world is explored further in another of Plath's 'Holocaust poems', 'Lady Lazarus. In this poem, Plath adopts a mocking tone to describe those who seek to commodify her suicide attempts. In this case, Plath makes use of familiar images of her everyday existence to explore the commodification and objectification of women. In a direct reference to her male relationships, Plath writes after her suicide attempt; 'I am your opus/ I am your valuable/ The pure gold baby'. In doing so she uses language and diction of value such as the 'pure gold baby' to describe the commodification of her existence by the masculine overseers of her life who seek to conform her to an unrealistic vision of 'purity' and 'value'.
