An Explication of Sylvia Plath8217s 8220Daddy8221 Essay

An Explication of Sylvia Plath8217s 8220Daddy8221 It tends to be the trend for women who have had traumatic childhoods to be attracted to men who epitomize their emptiness felt as children. Women who have had unaffectionate or absent fathers, adulterous husbands or boyfriends, or relatives who molested them seem to become involved in relationships with men who, instead of being the opposite of the â€Å"monsters† in their lives, are the exact replicas of these ugly men. Sylvia Plath’s poem â€Å"Daddy† is a perfect example of this unfortunate trend. In this poem, she speaks directly to her dead father and her husband who has been cheating on her, as the poem so indicates. The first two stanzas, lines 1-10, tell the readers that†¦show more content†¦In stanza 12, she tells us that he has â€Å"bit her pretty red heart in two.† Next, she states that he died when she was ten, and when she was twenty years old, she attempted suicide - â€Å"†¦I tried to die, to get back back back to you.† In stanza 13 is where she starts talking about her husband. She says that instead of dying, her friends â€Å"stuck her together with glue,† and since she could not die to get back to her father, she would marry someone who was similar. â€Å"I made a model of you, a man in black with a Meinkampf look for a love of the rack and the screw. And I said I do, I do.† These lines are frightening, but unfortunately real. Plath tells us that she has married someone exactly like her father, a man who has a â€Å"my struggle† look, a German look. The third line above seems to mean that her husband, who was poet Ted Hughes, cheated on her, in turn abandoning her. But she still said â€Å"I do† and agreed to be with him. The last two stanzas are the darkest, and ultimately appear to put some type of closure on Plath’s life. She obviously believes that she killed her father when she was ten years old, stating that â€Å"if I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed