A shoe is very tight and has not really got much room for a foot to move, and Plath’s father is being compared as the black shoe keeping her trapped for thirty years. Its as if she has not been able to free herself from his tight grasp that he had on her life even after he died. It is slowly suffocating her being trapped in his grasp, slowly draining every last bit of life from her until she sees no point to living. You can also see that she was trapped in another part of the poem, it is spread over two stanza’s, this shows enjambment. ‘Ghastly statue with one grey toe/ Big as a Frisco seal/ And a head in the freakish Atlantic/where it pours bean green over blue/ in the waters off beautiful Nauset’. Frisco is short for San Francisco, which is on the West Coast of the U.S.A, and Nauset is on the west coast of the USA what the quotation says is that her father will follow her where ever she goes in the U.S.A, this big statue is her father. His ‘grey toe’ spreads from the west coast all the way to where his head is on the east coast of the USA Also the ‘grey’ in ‘ghastly statue with one grey toe’ could suggest that she has this dark cloud always over her wherever she goes. She cannot get away from it. Grey is a very dull colour and can be associated with sadness, and I feel this is what is meant by the quote.
Dickinson also shares these issues but just not to the same extent, you can see this in the last stanza of her poem. Her first line is, ‘And then a Plank in Reason, broke,’ maybe this suggests that her last straw has broken, she’s been driven over the edge by something. This suggests depression and insecurity. She’s beginning to lose her mind and maybe going mad. Also in this quotation capital letters are used in the wrong places, this is bringing emphasis down on these certain words, or shows her anger at the time of writing the poem. Maybe she was very erratic when wrote the poem and also very angry, she was not in enough control to make proper sense and use proper English. The sense of being tipped over the edge also show’s in ‘Kept beating – beating – till I thought/ My Mind was going numb-‘ the sense off something keep on repeating in your mind is enough to drive you mad, however Dickinson seems to have a constant drum beat in her mind. It’s beginning to drive her mad and maybe she cannot take it any more. The dashes in the quotation are extremely effective, not only do they draw emphasis to the word but also slow the sentence down drawing an even greater emphasis towards the word. If anything a pause occurs and you think for that moment of what you have just read and draws you further into the poem and the emotions involved. I feel this technique works very well and is also used in Plath’s ‘Daddy’ but just not as much.
Plath’s tone seems to be very childish, the word daddy often used by very young children, it’s also maybe what Plath used to call him when she was young. The childish language suggests that she still remembers it like it was yesterday and she also still relives her childhood and what she used to do with her dad. Plath’s anger is also shown when she says, ‘Not God but a swastika’ this suggests that instead of having a nice person to look upto she’s only had evil. Maybe Plath feels that she was being persecuted for her father leaving her, so she compares it to the Jews being persecuted for who they were. Maybe plath did not have enough time to develop her own views of her own and because her father was German he was associated with the Nazi’s and also in her mind he had done wrong, leaving her when she was young was the biggest crime he could commit. Her anger is also portrayed in, ‘A cleft in your chin instead of your foot/ But no less a devil for that, no not’ says that you still have that cleft of a devil although not in the right place. You still left me at a young age and that is not right for you to do that to me, and suggests that he is evil for doing so. Her frustration is shown in one of the most emotional and vivid quotations in the poem, ‘Chuffing me off like a Jew./ A Jew to Dachau, Aushwitz, Belsen’. All the named places are Nazi death camps and she feels that she is being taken there on this emotional ride, that her father has led her on this ride because of his death, or it could possibly be saying that it is slowly driving her to suicide. Her suffering can be seen in, ‘the polish town/ scraped flat by the roller/ of wars, wars, wars’. This quote suggests that when her father died it totally destroyed and anialated her and that is why it is being compared to Poland being destroyed in the war.
Dickinson’s frustration can be seen in, ‘And then I heard them lift a box/ And creak across my Soul/ With those same old Boots of Lead, again,’ this suggests that they have lifted the lid on the box meaning a coffin. Her soul is in the coffin which is extremely unusual as a soul is supposed to last forever and never die, but yet Dickinson’s has died, not even her soul could be bothered to carry on as the depression was really deep down and the same life would be lived again. The boots of lead suggest that there is a huge weight constantly weighing her down and she cannot move, they’re stomping down slowly destroying and crushing her with every stomp taken.
Metaphors also have a big part to play in both poems. In Plath’s poem she often uses metaphors to describe herself to Jews and in Dickinson’s, ‘I Felt a Funeral in my Brain’ uses them to describe her depression. ‘Boots of Lead’ is a good example as it’s as if she is being held down by ‘the boots of lead’. You wear boots on your feet and they are full of a very dense material lead which weighs her down, this massive amount of pressure just keeps her down and she cannot free herself from the pressure. Also ‘As all the Heavens were a Bell’, this suggests that the heavens are ringing, maybe saying that times up for you as a bell often signifies the end of something and that is what Dickinson felt like and what she heard in her mind. Plath uses metaphors to describe the racial superiority of the Germans over the Jews and anyone else they despised. ‘The boot in the face, the brute’ it sounds as if someone has been extremely disrespectful, maybe she is suggesting that she’s just been kicked in the face when her father died, and the mark has always been there and always will be there. This ‘brute’ is her father and that is who left this print in her face. ‘The vampire who said he was you’, the vampire is the metaphor and describes someone as someone who lives off of your blood and is a very evil thing. So what she is saying is that there was an evil person in her life that tried to take the place of her father. Maybe that person lived of Plath’s emotions.
Both the beginnings of each poem have similarities both start with very sombre and depressing moods with clear and vivid imagery, and they contain true emotions that can be felt by the reader. The first stanza of ‘Daddy’ gives you a clear image of Plath being trapped inside this tight suffocating shoe, while Dickinson’s gives a very clear image of a sad depressing funeral. However the endings are not in the slightest similar, Plath’s ends very furiously calling her dad a bastard, ‘Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through’ shows her intense emotions and extreme furiosity towards her father in the final stanza, it is also a very accusing stanza. ‘They are
