Harness
Daddy VS Papa
In the two poems “Daddy” by Sylvia Plath and “My Papa’s Waltz” by Theodore Roethke the father is the main subject. “Daddy” is set in a hatred tone, while “My Papa’s Waltz” is humorous. Sylvia Plath seems to be letting out anger towards her father while Theodore Roethke is setting a tone only he can understand. The little boy in “My Papa’s Waltz” does not resent his father in anyway. While “Daddy”, shows Sylvia as hating her father for what he did. In “My Papa’s Waltz”, Theodore Roethke seems to have been manhandled as a child. While Sylvia Plath in “Daddy” was never physically harmed but emotionally.
Written in the 1960’s “Daddy” seems to have taken place in the 40’s. As a child Sylvia Plath grew up to think of her father as God. He was the head of the household and ran the house with an iron fist. Her father was a German who came to the United States from Poland. Sylvia refers to her father as a Nazi, when in fact he was not one at all. Otto Plath, Sylvia’s father, was in fact a Republican, not a Nazi. Her mother may have been partly Jewish. So, as she finds out her father was German and a very domineering man she resents him for what his nationality did to her mother’s nationality. Sylvia Plath’s father died from gangrene when Sylvia was only 8. It seems as though the girl in the poem is not Sylvia at all but a person she made up whom is similar to her. “Daddy” is a poem of total rejection. It seems as though she hates all men not only her father. Plath confesses that, after failing to escape her predicament through attempted suicide, she married a surrogate father, "a man in black with a Meinkampf look" who willingly was just as much a vampire of her spirit, one who "drank my blood for a year, / Seven years, if you want to know." Turns out she was married to the poet Ted Hughes for seven years.
