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Two Poems Two Lives Daddy by Sylvia Plath (1932 - 1963) and My Papas Waltz by Theodore Roethke (1908 - 1963) are autobiographic poems that describe father-child relationships. Sylvia Plath portrays her father Otto Plath and Theodore Roethke portrays his father Otto Roethke. These two poems are ambiguous and reveal much not only about both poets childhoods, but also about their adult characters as well as perception of themselves. The task of this work is analysis and comparison of the poems Daddy by Sylvia Plath and My Papas Waltz by Theodore Roethke. In the poem Daddy Sylvia Plath tells the story of abusive father and narrators, here Sylvia's attitude towards the father.
From the first stanza, the author creates the image of constraints that the father held over her. The metaphor of the black shoe, in which Sylvia lived for thirty years, symbolizes the moral pressure of her father. She used to be a shoe, which he held down to the ground by the whole weight of his authority. The similar lived like a foot means that Sylvia Plath was beneath her father, he stood on her, dominated her. Sylvia Plath's father died when she was ten, but she mentions the time span of thirty years, which shows that her father stayed in her heart, mind and consciousness and influenced her whole life.
Plath first associates herself with Jews oppressed by Fascists and she associates her father with Fascist and their leader Hitler. I think I may well be a Jew (Plath) your neat mustache (Plath) The allusion to Jews and Hitler carries ambiguous meaning and shows that the influence of Otto Plath on his daughter was deathly destructive. Sylvia Plath associates her sufferings with suffering of Jews in times of Holocaust, reveals her genuine sufferings from her father, who was physically and morally abusive. At the same time, there exists additional reason for her hatred to the father, the fact that he was German: I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene (Plath) After the World War II in consciousness of many people every German symbolized Nazism and all its horrors. Sylvia Plath shares such perception of Germans and she wants to distance herself from her German ancestors, her German father, she associates herself with Jews and Gypsies on purpose. Jews and Gypsies for centuries were the symbols of nations without homeland. Simultaneously with the desire to distance from German roots, the author laments this alienation. One more message that Sylvia Plath masterfully plaited into this metaphor of Jews and Gypsies carries the idea of her loss after her father died. Father died, and she lost her connection with her roots, she lost herself and became a vagabond soul.
In the following stanzas, the readers see that Sylvia's life was impossible without her father, she grieved for him and attempted suicide in order to join him: At twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back to you. (Plath) Later she found the way to transfer her emotional connection with the father on her husband Ted Hughes. Ted Hughes possessed all her fathers drawbacks, he was abusive, and Plath found substitute to her father in Hughes. Here the Electra complex can be traced, when women subconsciously seeks the reflection of father in her husband. From the line I made a model of you, it becomes evident, that the author addresses both her husband and her father; they become inseparable in her conscience. If I've killed one man, I've killed two (Plath) The poem Daddy by Sylvia Plath carries very pessimistic tone. The woman realizes that for all of her life she was dominated first by her abusive father and later by her no less abusive husband.
Her father died when she was ten years old, but he continued to influence her adult life. Fathers strong personality made deep impact on the conscience of the little child. When Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath's husband left her, she finally understood the whole horror of the situation. Shi finds her voice to say that the collective image of her father and her husband is the vampire, who sucked her blood. The end of the poem is dramatic, as well as the end of Sylvia Plath's life. The poison of corruptive influence of both her father and husband was very deep in Plath's blood.
She attempted suicide three times and finally, in 1963, at the age of thirty she killed herself with cooking gas. The last stanza of the poem Daddy is like a premonition, written three months before Plath's suicide. Sylvia Plath understood that the only way to get rid of her fathers domination was to commit suicide, because he was alive only in her head, in her conscience. There's a stake in your fat, black heart Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through. (Plath) The poem My Papas Waltz by Theodore Roethke is close in theme to Daddy by Sylvia Plath, but it is completely different tone and the message conveyed. Theodore Roethke in the poem My Papas Waltz creates the image of his father Otto Roethke and describes a scene from the family life. Like Daddy, the poem My Papas Waltz carries ambiguity of meaning, each image has double entendre.
Theodore Roethke describes his father as not a nice person. From the first two lines father is described as unpleasant: The whiskey on your breath Could make a small boy dizzy (Roethke) From the very beginning the reader feels dislike towards the papa from the poem. In consciousness of the reader papa associates with those parents, who abuse their children. The following lines confirm the first impression. Papas waltzing is awkward and careless, his waltzing reminds romping, not dancing.
The word beat not only refers to the musical rhythm, but it also to fathers battered hand, which creates associates with physical pain. All these evidences thrown along the poem by the author create the image of the abusive drinking father and eliminate the helplessness of the boy. The last phrase of the poem reveals to the reader, that despite the superficial negative message, the idea of the whole poem is optimistic and even nostalgic. Then waltzed me off to bed Still clinging to your shirt. (Roethke) Last two phrases reveal that Papa is very dear to the son, because waltzed me off to bed carries positive connotation as something pleasant and happy. The phrase Still clinging to your shirt creates framing to the poem together with the phrase I hung on like death in the fist stanza. This framing has two purposes.
The framing notes that the authors father had been dead by the time Theodore Roethke wrote the poem. The son forgave his father for all his faults and the fact of the fathers death is evident from his sons forgiveness. This fact is confirmed by Theodore Roethke's biography. The poem My Papas Waltz was written in 1948 and his father died from cancer in 1923. The framing also accents, that the memories of the father became light and precious.
Theodore Roethke does not express hurt or hatred in the poem My Papas Waltz, he only retells the domestic scene and shows nostalgia. The forgiveness is the important difference between to poems Daddy by Sylvia Plath and My Papas Waltz by Theodore Roethke. This difference arises the question, why one of the authors could forgive his fathers fault and remembered them with endearment, while another author carried hatred in the heart towards the grave. Here the difference of sexes comes into spotlight. Theodore Roethke and the narrator of the poem My Papas Waltz are males. When he grew up and became the member of the society, he could view his childhood and abusive father from the distance.
Sylvia Plath, being the contemporary of Theodore Roethke, experienced the oppression of women, and she looked into her childhood through the prism of her dependant and constrained adulthood. It is important to notice, that even in the third millennium there remained traces of chauvinism and oppression of women. In the first half of the twentieth century, the feminism movement was only making first steps for emancipation of women. Sylvia Plath viewed her father and her husband as the symbols of oppression, the only escape from which was death. Bibliography Axelrod, Steven G. Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992. Bassett, Susan, ed. Women Writers: Sylvia Plath. Barnes and Noble Books, 1987.
Bloom, Harold. Theodore Roethke. NY: Chelsea, 1988. Here, William. Profile of Theodore Roethke. Charles E.
Merrill Publishing Company, 1971. Plath, Sylvia. The Collected Poems. Harper & Row, 1981 Roethke, Theodore. The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke. Doubleday & Company, Inc. , 1966 Stevenson, Anne.
Bitter fame: a life of Sylvia Plath. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989.
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