[Daddy] By Sylvia Plath

The poem starts off by giving the impression that it might follow the pattern of a common nursery rhyme. However, as we read on, it becomes clear that this is a haunting twist on the loving connotation of nursery rhymes.

The narrator describes a black shoe that she has been forced to live in and by the second stanza it is clear that she is talking about her father. The narrator says, “Daddy, I have had to kill you./ You have died before I had time—”(line 6,7). I interpreted these lines to mean that the narrator has had to kill this love for her father because she has realized what a hateful person he is, regardless of the fact that he created her and was her family. Daughters are typically taught to love their fathers regardless of their flaws, but the narrator has  to kill this instinct in order to find peace. The narrator says he has died too soon because she was not able to accept this separation from him while he was alive. The narrator did not have the opportunity to divorce herself from her relationship with her father while he was alive and she regrets this.

As the poem goes on, it becomes clear that her father was German and that his brutality continues to haunt her. The narrator begins to assume that every German is her father and feels fear and anxiety. The narrator describes how she couldn’t even bring herself to speak to her father because the words would get painfully stuck in her mouth like her tongue was stuck on barbed wire. This imagery is extremely painful and gives us a glimpse into the emotional torment and trauma that surrounds her relationship with her father.

The narrator goes further to compare her fear of her father to the the Jewish people’s fear of the Germans. Plath then uses dark irony in saying that every woman is taught to like a strong man, although they may beat and abuse them, “Every woman adores a Fascist,/The boot in the face, the brute” (line 47,48).

As the poem comes to a close we see a more complicated side to this father daughter relationship. As the narrator has alluded to, girls like her were taught to love their fathers and respect strong men. Therefore when she lost her father at the very young age of ten, she obviously felt immense depression over the loss of her father.

The narrator marries a man that she describes as “a model of you” (line 64) and she later goes on to kill him and her lasting connection to her father. The man she married is described as a vampire that fed off her for seven years. The anger flares up as the narrator realizes who she is and what she believes and she finally has the courage to terminate all love for her father and abusive men in general. The narrator ends the poem describing villagers dancing on this grave of everything that her father  represented for her and she concludes the poem with, “Daddy, daddy, yu bastard, I’m through.” (line 80).

[Diving into the Shipwreck] by Adrienne Rich

On the surface this poem seems to be about a person literally diving into the ocean to look at the remnants of a ship wreck. There are not too many direct clues that this poem is a metaphor for something greater, however many connections formed in my mind through the imagery and descriptions.

The narrator is very focussed on the ladder that she has to go down in order to enter the ocean, “We know what it is for,/ we who have used it.” (line 16,17) The narrator seems to be talking about how a person can never truly understand something until they have experienced it themselves. Without having experienced something, it is hard to have the proper perspective or information necessary to understand it. As she climbs down the ladder into the ocean she is going from one world into another. It is frightening and she almost blacks out or forgets why she came but she is full of power.

I took this shipwreck to be a metaphor for the flaws, hatred, and chaos found in society. Somewhere along the way society went wrong, it wrecked and it damaged everything. It is scary to ask people to look back on history and delve into the mistakes that lead to the loss of humanity in society. The narrator seems to stress that it will be terrifying and accepting the damage that has happened in the past and that it has to be done alone no matter how painful and terrifying that might be.

The narrator repeats twice that she is both man and woman, all wrapped into one, facing the damage of this massive shipwreck head on. It is not a myth or a story, it is a reality to be experienced right in front of her.