Mr. Dean Block G
How did Sylvia Plath’s personal tragedies lead to her poetry?
Sylvia Plath had a hard and depressing life, which led to the composure of many of her poems. Sylvia’s life experience influenced her poems in many ways; she liked to mask her personal tragedy in her poems. Her poems show pain, hate, mistrust, darkness, and the need for acceptance and love, that is how she portrayed her life. Still misunderstood to this day, her life and poems inspire whoever reads them. Her poor relationship with her father, a failed marriage, and the feeling of not being accepted all lead to the writing of some of Sylvia Plath’s best poems.
Plath’s poor relationship with her father lead to “Daddy” which expresses her emotions towards her father’s life and death. Plath’s father died when she was at the tender age of 10, a time when she still pictured him as her hero. Gradually throughout the poem, she realizes the flaws in her father’s ways and then compares him to a Nazi. In her poem Plath says, "I used to pray to recover you." using the past tense "I used to" which gives the reader the idea that she no longer prays for his recovery. “Daddy, I have had to kill you.” This of course means her memories of her unhealthy relationship with him have been terminated. Sylvia Plath then expresses her pain for her mother and what she had to go through having her father as a husband. “Every woman adores a Fascist. The boot in the face, the brute, brute heart of a brute like you.” Plath compared her father to a Nazi and herself to a Jew, portraying her relationship with him as dominant. "At twenty I tried to die, and get back, back, back to you. I thought even the bones would do." She is referring to her attempt at suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills, saying she tried to get back to him and be with him in death.
Plath’s failed marriage with Ted Hughes also helped in the making of “Daddy”. Not only does it express her emotions towards her father, but also her husband. Plath found many connections between her father and Ted Hughes, in a few of her poems; she compares them to the devil, vampires and even Nazi. In the poem “Daddy”, Plath suggests that she was attracted to Ted Hughes because he reminded her of her father, Otto Plath. She then explains how that relationship worked out when she says “If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two-
The vampire who said he was you,
and drank my blood for a year” The two men are her father and her husband. She portrayed them both as vampires. “But no less a devil for that, no not any less the black man who bit my pretty heart in two…” Here Plath conveys her husband as the devil and mentions how he broke her heart in two, which probably refers to when he was cheating on her with a woman who was renting their flat in London. There is a theory that in her poem “The moon and the Yew tree” when she sees “Darkness and silence” she is actually referring to Ted Hughes and / or her father as the darkness. “Ode for Ted” is also full of metaphors about her and Ted’s failed marriage.
Sylvia Plath never felt like she belonged. Often putting on a façade for her friends and family. She pulled off the façade quite well. Sylvia was a model child, sensitive, popular, intelligent and well behaved. She earned straight A’s, and her first poem was published before she was 9. But as described in many of her poems, she never felt quite like she belonged. In her poem “Family Reunion” she says, “I cast off my identity and make the fatal plunge.” Probably meaning, she pulls on her mask and pretends to be this person that she’s not. “Mirror” is another example of a poem about a double life. In my opinion, in this poem, she wants to try and hang onto the things everyone tells her she is, beautiful, young and everything a woman wants to be. But she feels she is turning into the old woman she mentions in her poem. “A woman bends over me, searching my reaches for what she really is.” The woman is she, and she’s trying to find herself in the façade she has created.
Plath masked personal emotions of her father, her husband and her fake identity cleverly with the use of many metaphors. She took the quote, "We only begin to live when we conceive life as tragedy…" (William Butler Yeats) to heart in her writing. All of Plath’s personal tragedies swelled her up in a huge depression and ultimately took her life. They say everything happens for a reason, and if all of the horrible things that Sylvia had to go through didn’t happen, we would have never gotten to read the wonderful and cherished works of Sylvia Plath.
