Plath Daddy You\'re and Nick analysis PDF

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Plath Daddy You're and Nick analysis...

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“Daddy”, “You’re” and “Nick and The Candlestick” analysis Sylvia Plath’s poetry evokes a true sense that pure desire and will to be happy, to be part of the world in which we exist does not ensure happiness, more so it can entrench within those vulnerable as Plath appears to have been a sense of dystopic panic and desperation that becomes utterly destructive. Plath’s poem express that deep scars can distort our present selves so that even the happiest of times, such as the expectation of a child can become “a stake in your fat black heart”. The character in Plath’s “Daddy” seems acutely distressed about the relationship they had with their father, the term “black” litters the poem in “black boot” “blackboard” “black man” and “a man in black” to evoke the sense that that was the prominent feeling felt during the time of the relationship, the blunt “ck” sound of the term black stabbing at the reader as one would imagine the memories of her father, which works in with the commanding tone she suggests he uses on her “ich, ich, ich” and “ach” like an attack. Additionally, Plath plays on the historic notoriety of the NAZI with the image of the Aryan, cold and hard, when describing the man with his “Aryan Eye” implying one of accusation and judgement, “Luftwaffe” an ever-present hovering above, ready to obliterate at any time, and “an engine, an engine” something unhuman, stoic and hard, with no heart, no emotions of love and, punctuating this notion “a Meinkampf look”, thus a theory behind the torture he dished out to the girl. Plath’s character likens herself to a “Jew” and the reader comes to understand the state of fragile submission she saw herself under, as any child probably does, only actually able to stand up to the man, kill him off metaphorically, and only after a suicide attempt due to a seeming feeling that she was partly to blame for his actions, again that biting use of “back, back, back” to you conjuring the idea she felt she was quite like him in personality and perhaps caused the “wars, wars, wars”. This seems confirmed when she marries a “black man” in his image, who also “bit [her] heart in two” as though she chose her husband to torture herself for what she considered her own faults and wanted to perversely allow him to continue to punish her for her faults, or else live with a similar man and try to gain some sort of atonement with him vicariously. It is looking into Plath’s future that the reader can see the emergence of the emotional scars brought on by her father through the transitioning from a type of joy in the future expectation of a child in “You’re”, yet the return of some type of dread when the child has first been born in “Nick and the Candlestick”. It can be suggested that perhaps the hopes felt in the first were of a hope that the child would not have to live under such an abusive father as she did, yet there is always the recollection by the reader that Plath married a man just like him and who would be there as parent. Looking at the poem “You’re” the reader bounces about the page with the cadence and form Plath has utilised to express her excitement of the baby that she is going to have. Phrases, through enjambment, bounce along, such as “”Clownlike, happiest on your hands, feet to the stars and moon-skulled”, the “P” and “T” sounds clang about, sharp and joyful, staccato like. Plath’s images are of a happy clown, one fooling about, having fun inside the uterus and she replies to him with quip of “Thumbs down on Dodo’s-mode” exacerbating her feelings of him bouncing about inside her and never giving up, never dying the way the dodo did, again the “D” sounds like a bouncing ball, explosions of happiness in Plath. The reference to “my little loaf” is simply beautiful as the baby growing rises like a nice fresh loaf of bread in the oven. This is a child without the stain of parental abuse or the weariness of the world that Plath knows and so a “clean slate, with your own face on” and “trawling your dark like owls do”, implying a natural affinity with the dark, no fear of what may lurk in there or irrational fear that is learn as people get older. Again, in the second stanza there is true life inside Plath that she is enjoying the euphoria of the child moving about inside her, “like a

sprat in a pickle jug, a creel of eels, all ripples” “jumpy as a Mexican bean”, the lexicon full of life, knowing that this is new life, a part of her life and something she can form and mould into something happy, without the “black boot”. This reference to a new start is punctuated, albeit by something that is more serious, in the final, an sense elicited that Plath has even some sort of anger in her about her “face”, her identity, as she comment the child is “a clean slate, with your own face on”. In fact the reader can sense even some sort of fear in her, that we are stripped of our identity, stripped of our metaphorical “own face” as the years pass and she wants to indulge in this child’s as much as she can before it is wiped away, as she may have felt hers was. The sentiment of fear in the last line of this poem becomes outright overwhelming in the poem “Nick and the Candlestick”. All Plath’s dream of nurturing a child as a “clean slate”, full of joy, is not the entire experience of pregnancy, there is a brutal pain too it also, that causes “tears”. Here, Plath is a “miner”, seemingly digging into her belly, her uterus to find that cause of her pain and within that finds the metaphorical brutality of the female body during pregnancy. It is toxic as “the light burns blue” referencing the poisonous gases of the old mines. These stalactites are “waxy drip and thicken” a grotesque encounter with “icicles”, “A vice of knives” and “panes of ice” all brutal in their danger and agony. The fear and pain in Plath is palpable as the child moves, not like some of joyous “creel of eels” or Mexican jumping bean” but “Exudes from its dead boredom” and “the blood blooms” and “the pain [the child] awakes to is not [his]”. Here, each stanza, only three lines are all designed by Plath to elicit imagery that adds to the pain of the last through the enjambment from one to the next, never allowing a break for the reader in the agony of the experience. It is relentless as each stanza contains at least one word that cuts to the quick, such as “burns” “dead” “cold homicides” icicles” “knives” “cripple drip” and “terrible well”. The last line, though, plays out something different, the seeming reference to Jesus in the manger, in “You are the baby in the barn” alludes to Plath’s understanding, or hope, that this is all worth the pain as this child holds something deeply and religiously special to her. In all, Plath’s poems reflect a woman wanting to free herself of her torturous past, though still holding herself accountable to some extent for the way she has been treated. In this, she feels that the event of a new child can be one of opportunity for her to take that knowledge of what damages, what destroys and hopefully have a child of her own that she can protect, yet, reality, brutal at times in it physical and mental endurance can stop the dreams of anybody in their tracks and test their faith....