Critical appreciation of the poem "Old Ladies' Home" by Sylvia Plath with reference to the presentation of old age

Dealing with old age and loneliness can be both complicated and perplexing. Sylvia Plath shows us this through her poem "Old Ladies' Home, where she shares her views on the harsh reality of growing into old age and awaiting death alone. In this poem, the omniscient speaker employs a detached tone to describe the old ladies in the home as fragile, lifeless and neglected. The poem takes place in a home for aged women, as can be inferred from the title of the poem and contains several images and metaphors that bring out the poem's main theme of death. Several symbols are used to represent death in this poem. A few such examples would be "black fabric", "ghosts" and "coffins". These symbols present death as dull and eerie, rather than as the celebration of a life well lived, hence building a sombre and gloomy atmosphere in the poem. This in turn reflects the old ladies' melancholic state as they await their death in the home. Death, for these old women, is also presented as being unpredictable and as an issue that lingers in their mind every night. For example, the last stanza of the poem says, "And Death, that bald-head buzzard, / Stalls in halls where the lamp wick/ Shortens with each breath drawn." Metaphor is used here to compare death to the buzzard which is a scavenging bird, similar to the vulture. Death is described as something that lurks within the home, waiting for

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  • Level: AS and A Level
  • Subject: English
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Sylvia Plath,

A commentary of "Daddy" by Sylvia Plath "Daddy", one of Plaths most famous and detailed autobiographical poems, was written in the last years of her life and is saturated with suppressed anger and dark imagery. The sixteen stanza poem, through Plaths use of ambiguous symbolism, arguably is bitterly addressing Plaths father, who died when she was only eight, and her husband Ted Hughes, who had broken her "pretty red heart in two" (st.12, line 1). The poem is intense with once suppressed emotion, setting an aggressive, desperate, almost psychic tone and is highly concentrated on the theme of death. With Plath's application of various techniques including diction, imagery, enjambment, contrast, repetition and oxymoron, the poem comes across as shocking with the intensity of feeling and the passionate sadness that highlight the suicidal messages conveyed. As is pointed out, the context of the poem "Daddy" is that of Plath's husband's affair with another woman. Grieved to the point of psychotic anger Plath's use of imagery throughout the piece accentuates the hopeless despair of the speaker at the conflicting male relationships in Plath's life: first her father and then husband. "Any more, black shoe In which I have lived like a foot..." The metaphor of 'black shoe' possibly used to denote a person, suggests a stifling image. The speaker claims to have lived in that shoe,

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  • Level: AS and A Level
  • Subject: English
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Analyse the poem "Daddy" by Sylvia Plath

Analyse the poem "Daddy" by Sylvia Plath The title "Daddy" evokes images of nurturing fathers, willing to do anything for their children; it suggests innocence and protection. Plath could be using this in a number of different ways. It may be ironic - she uses this word to describe her father because he should have been a model for her, and he was the precise opposite of her ideals. It also suggests a longing for her father to have been this model. It may relate to the feminist issues at the time Plath wrote "Daddy" - fathers were all believed to be a perfect model for society, and women and daughters who were victims of them were mostly ignored. The repetition of "you do not do" gives the persona an assertive edge; she is standing up to her father. It also makes her sound a little immature, as though she has to express herself in this way. Indeed, the syntax throughout the poem is stilted, with little complicated vocabulary, giving the persona a childlike quality. Plath writes that she "lived like a foot" in the "shoe" of her father. It implies that her father, as the "shoe", surrounded her. It could suggest that she could not escape him, and she "wore" him - he was a burden to her. She also writes that in her father's presence, she is "barely daring to breath" - she is terrified of him. This ties in with the shoe point made earlier - her father seems a tyrant, overbearing

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  • Level: AS and A Level
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Spinster- A Commentary

Spinster- A Commentary Spinster is a poem which juxtaposes the order and disorder of the seasons and how exactly this affects the persona's desperation to keep control. The title 'Spinster' implies that the persona has a chosen a life without men, which also implies that she wants full control over her life. Stanza one begins very formally, 'During a ceremonious April walk/ With her latest suitor'. Lexis such as 'ceremonious' and 'suitor' creates a very formal atmosphere, therefore creating more structure, which is also implied by the use of the word 'suitor', which suggests very little or no feeling towards him. The stanza continues to imply that the woman can hardly stand disorder, 'intolerably struck/ By the birds irregular babel/ And the leaves litter'. The poet uses alliteration and positive alliteration to suggest that the woman can not handle disorder with words such as 'irregular' and 'litter'. Then, in stanza two, Plath stays detached from the poem, and the whole stanza implies disorder. 'Observed' suggests that the woman in the poem was watching from a distance, and therefore the writing is very detached and as if a step has been taken back in order to see things as a whole. Also, the whole stanza implies disorder with lexis such as 'unbalanced', 'uneven', 'wilderness' and 'disarray', all of which suggest disarray and no order. Almost all of these words are

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Present the way in which imprisonment is presented in 'The Bell Jar' The bell jar is an inverted glass jar, generally used to display an object of scientific curiosity

Present the way in which imprisonment is presented in 'The Bell Jar' The bell jar is an inverted glass jar, generally used to display an object of scientific curiosity, contain a certain kind of gas, or maintain a vacuum. For Esther, the bell jar symbolizes madness. When gripped by insanity, she feels as if she is inside an airless jar that distorts her perspective on the world and prevents her from connecting with the people around her. At the end of the novel, the bell jar has lifted, but she can sense that it still hovers over her, waiting to drop at any moment. The narrative technique used in The Bell Jar is a first person narrative. Straight away we get the idea of imprisonment through elements of the unhappy narrative voice in the early chapters. The first sentence of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar alerts the reader to the conflicts that will be dealt with in this semi-autobiographical novel: "It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenberg's, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York." The speaker will tell us in the next few sentences that she is "stupid" and that she feels "sick," and that she is preoccupied with death. Like Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye, this young, college age, girl-woman is experiencing an adolescent crisis. When Esther Greenwood tells us in the first sentence that this is "the summer they electrocuted the

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  • Level: AS and A Level
  • Subject: English
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