Commentary on ‘Daddy’ and ‘The Arrival of the Bee Box’ By Sylvia Plath Essay

Sylvia Plath was born(p) in 1932 to Otto Plath, a German immigrant and Aurelia Plath, an Ameri apprize of Austrian descent. She had a actually troubled demeanor, suffering extreme depression and emotional trauma forward she committed suicide in 1963 by putting her head into a gas oven. Most of her poesys reflect this distress and reveal the sorrows of her short life. The poems pop music and The arrival of the Bee concussion are both sad and gloomy poems which foreground m whatever aspects of her life and perhaps reason out why she was squeeze to kill herself.Both the poems are directly or indirectly cerebrate to the cardinal most important and influential men of Sylvias life- her get down, and her preserve Ted Hughes, who himself was a poet. She loved both men, but both of them dominated her and gave her disturb and misery which do her life unhappy. As the title suggests, the poem protactinium is primarily about her father, but many references are also made to Ted Hu ghes. The Arrival of the Bee Box is more about herself, but in malevolence of that the reader has to know the temperament of these two men to under bear out the poem completely and derive a meaning from it. Daddy highlights the relationship of Sylvia and her father.Sylvias father died when she was just ten. This was the time when she adored her father and his death meant a lot to her. But the poem shows the immense hatred she has towards him as she piecemeal realized how he oppressed her and dominated her life. To use the say soda water as the title of the poem is in a way wry because although the poem is about Sylvias father, the word doesnt fit in particularly well, as it is usually use in a confirming way, non in a pessimistic and dirty way. The poem has a lot of tomography, metaphors and similes which illustrates Sylvias anger towards her father and save and gives the poem a dark vestige.In the poem Sylvia has compared her father to a black raiment while has called herself a foot living in it for thirty years. normally a shoes job is to protect or nourish the foot, not to make it feel trapped and helpless. Her father was so authoritarian, that he made Sylvia feel just that. Although her father died when she was ten, she says that she lived like the foot for thirty years, barely daring to breathe or achoo. This shows that her fathers nature haunted her even after he died, as it left much(prenominal) a pro appoint and negative psychological mark on her.The word black can be related to death and makes us theorise of the shoe like a coffin. The idea of a coffin can also be related in the other poem, The Arrival of the Bee Box, when Sylvia calls the bee buffet a midgets coffin. Sylvias father was a zoology and bee expert, and so again we can notice how she has created a dark atmosphere with everything related to her father. On an abstract level, the bee box can be thought of as Sylvias brain and the bees as her thoughts. The idea of her thought s cosmos trapped inside a coffin shows how depressed and unhappy she is.The imagery of Daddy is very vivid and striking. Sylvia calls her father a Nazi as she writes, With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo. And youre neat moustache and your Aryan eye, bright blue. She compares her father to Hitler, highlighting how cruel and heartless he was. She calls herself a Jew, indicating how he used his confidence to oppress her. Such thoughts make us refer to the Holocaust, in which Jews were tortured and killed by the German Nazis. Although Sylvia was dominated by her father, she has used a Hyperbole to describe the situation. According to me her father must not run through been as ruthless as Hitler. She has just used this comparison to speak her immeasurable hatred towards him.She has further developed images of her father by employment him a vampire-someone who doesnt kill a person, but haunts it all his life by sucking his blood. She is trying to say that although her father is dead , his character give torment her forever. The imagery of The Arrival of the Bee Box is also strong. We get a clear picture of the bees struggling in the dark box illustrating how Sylvia is persuasion and whimsy. We get a feeling that her thoughts are tormenting her and that she is in a sick of(p) state of mind. She compares her thoughts to a Roman Mob and says she is not Julius Caesar to control them. Although it is not mentioned, we know that Sylvia is in such a state of mind because of her illogical marriage with Ted Hughes. She might be feeling cheated as Ted Hughes left her for some other woman. She must be feeling insecure and lonely and cannot in any way run away from her thoughts.In Daddy Sylvia also says that she found her fathers resemblance in Ted Hughes, who also dominated her and stone-broke her heart. Here she compares their torture to the medieval methods of the rack and the screw which were cruel and bloody. The tone of the poem is of fear and a little bit of an ger, blaming her father and her husband for giving her such a horrid life and simultaneously feeling scared of all that has happened to her in the past. The tone of The Arrival of the Bee Box is different, as she is sort of blaming herself for what she thinks. She is agitated with herself because she cannot get rid of her negative thoughts.The last two stanzas of both the poems are very strong and demonstrate an attitude of king and authority from Sylvia. In daddy the tone changes from fear to anger when Sylvia says, Daddy, daddy, you bastard, Im through. One feels that she has overcome all her fears to finally stand up to her father and speak with confidence and fight back. In The Arrival of the Bee Box she shows that she has power when she says, Tomorrow I will be odorous God, I will set them free. But here she makes it a point to tell the reader that she will not misuse her authority like the way Otto Plath and Ted Hughes did. In the last line of the poem she says that the box is only temporary, showing that she will make an effort to remove those thoughts from her mind, which is a positive end to the poem.