26+ Sylvia Plath Poems Explained

Ariel by Sylvia Plath is the title poem of her volume of poetry Ariel published after her death.

Sylvia plath poems explained. The lines are all quite short ranging from two words up to seven. Mirror by Sylvia Plath Giving an autobiographical account of itself the mirror has highlighted its qualities in the poem Mirror. The poetess suffered from clinical depression and attempted suicide several times succeeding in 1963 at the age of 30. This was a stressful time for Plath.

Daddy is a bold and violent poem directed at Plaths father. The poem is constructed of sets of three lines also known as tercets. Daddy is perhaps Sylvia Plaths most famous poem. The poem is composed of a series of images that take the reader into the speakers state of mind.

The well known first line typifies the poem. Claiming that though certain images reflected in it might be painful to certain people at certain stages of their lives it is in no way responsible for causing this pain because it reflects exactly what it sees. Daddy by Sylvia Plath uses emotional and sometimes painful metaphors to depict the poets own opinion of her father. Plath explained the poem briefly in a BBC interview.

Comparing herself to a Jew at the concentration camps she details how she needs to finally be through with her father. Plath is considered to be one of the best poets of her generation. It is the second on this list to reference the holocaust and compares a father figure to many things including a Nazi officer and a vampire. Fever 103 by Sylvia Plath is a very complex and powerful poem that speaks on themes of desire purity freedom and womens rightsindependence.

She is at first filled with guilt about her own sexual desires. Her case is complicated by the fact that her father was also a Nazi and her mother very possibly part Jewish. In Plaths own words. The father died while she thought he was God.

Sylvia Plaths poem Daddy remains one of the most controversial modern poems ever written. She was one of the pioneers in the genre of self-exploration and self-discovery. The poem begins with the speaker describing her father in several different striking ways. She was unfortunately riddled with mental agony which is often reflected in her poetry.

Read more about Sylvia Plath. It is a short poem that highlights the confused reactions of the mother the speaker Plath as she tends to the needs of her new baby. Sylvia Plath And A Summary of the Poem Mirror Mirror is a short two-stanza poem written in 1961. It is considered to be semi-autobiographical giving the reader and Plath scholar insight into the relationship between the writer and her own father Otto.

Although Sylvia Plath was succeeding poetically she was still deeply unhappy. The poem is spoken by a girl with an Electra complex. The poem is filled with the skillful application of consonance rhyming consonants and assonance rhyming vowels as well as an end slant or half-rhymes and head rhymes also called alliteration. These quatrains do not follow a specific rhyme scheme or metrical pattern this is a technique known as free verse.

Chanting in an almost nursery-rhyme manner she compares him to terrifying patriarchal figures like a vampire a Nazi and a devil. It is a dark surreal and at times painful allegory that uses metaphor and other devices to carry the idea of a female victim finally freeing herself from her father. Here is a poem spoken by a girl with an Electra complex. She tried to kill herself a number of times throughout the early 60s and in February of 1963 she succeeded.

Sylvia Plath was living in England with her fellow poet and husband Ted Hughes and she had already given birth to their first child Frieda. He is at once a black shoe she was trapped within a vampire a fascist and a Nazi. Morning Song is one of several poems Sylvia Plath wrote concerning pregnancy birth and maternal feelings.