Preparing for Death in Plath's DaddyThroughout the poem "Daddy" by Sylvia Plath, the author struggles to escape the memory of her deceased father as She was only ten years old. She also expresses anger at her husband, Ted Hughes, for abandoning her for another woman. The confessional poem begins with a series of metaphors about Plath's father that evolve from the divine to the demonic. Towards the end, a new metaphor emerges, when the author realizes that her ex-husband is actually her deceased father's vampire, sent to torture her. This hyperbole is central to the meaning of the poem. Lines 75 and 76 express the hope that they will stop oppressing him: “Daddy, you can lie down now / There's something at stake in your big black heart. » She concludes that her father can return to the grave, because she has finally gotten rid of the tension he had caused her, by killing his vampire form. Despite this apparent closure, we will however see that the author does not overcome her trauma. Plath does not clearly present herself as a feminist in this poem, but she expresses feelings that many women can relate to. She probably didn't hate all men or blame them for her pain, as some have suggested. She simply had to emotionally deal with her adulterous husband and her absent father, so she uses this poem to curse the two as co-conspirators of her misery. Nowhere in the poem does Plath group all men negatively. She says in line 48 that "Every woman adores a fascist", trying to explain her early admiration for her German father. But this is not a sarcastic attack on men, as it may seem. Rather, it refers to a destructive reality: rough men tend to attract women, especially those looking for a strong man to compensate...... middle of article... on Sexton's "My Friend" “My friend” Sexton later said that she and Sylvia had “talked about death with a burning intensity, we were both drawn to it like moths to a light bulb” (qtd. in Andrews). Less than a week before her suicide, Plath wrote, "the woman is perfected" (quoted in "Scenes"). In “Daddy,” she was “perfecting” herself in a sense for death, but her desperate mastery of reason ended in self-destruction. She proved that she couldn't end her problems. So while the last line of this poem may seem like a statement of closure, it is best interpreted as a statement of surrender. Plath was indeed done: she was done trying to overcome her distress, to love her husband, to fight with the memory of her father, and to live. Works Cited: Plath, Sylvia. "Dad." Collected poems. London: Faber, 1981.