Use of Figurative Language in Daddy by Sylvia Plath Essay -- Literary

The metonymical linguistic process in the numbers Daddy by Sylvia Plath quarter be employ to discover a deeper signifi laughingstockt of the poem. By using figurative language throughout the poem such as symbolism, visualisery, and wordplay, Plath reveals hidden messages about her family affinity with her have. Plath uses symbols of Nazis, vampires, size, and communication to help reveal a message about her dad. In Plaths poem she frequently uses figurative language about Nazis and the Holocaust. Plath depicts herself as a victim by saying she is like a Jew, and her aim is like a Nazi. Plath uses a train engine as a metaphor for her preceptor speaking the German Language, and also to depict herself as a victimized Jew being taken away to a preoccupancy camp. Plath states And the language obscene / An engine, and engine / Chuffing me off like a Jew (Plath 30-32). This shows the problematic metaphor of the train engine being her bugger off speaking the German lan guage and how she feels she is a prisoner. Plath uses other subtle metaphor that connect her father discreetly to the Nazis when she uses German words such as Luftwaffe (42) which is the German air force, and Panzer-man (45) who were the men who manned the German tanks. Another example of Plath using figurative language to depict her father as a Nazi can be found when she uses an allusion to Hitlers mustache and the blue eyes of Aryans. And your beseeming moustache / And your Aryan eyes, bright blue (Plath 43-44). The use of this allusion gives the father the image of Hitler himself and helps build the metaphor of her father as a Nazi. Towards the end of the poem Plath begins to be more blunt in depicting her dad as a Nazi. She uses the metaphor of her father not being like God, barely rather lik... ...voices just cant worm through (Plath 68-70) A metaphor compares the telephone to a plant, and the plant has been cut off at the root and therefor the communication has been cut off. The roots are roughly a metaphorical telephone line growing on her fathers grave, but now they are cut off and no longer available for communication. We can see the struggle Plath is having in missing so desperately to tell her father something but never having the find out to say it. By analyzing Plaths use of figurative language we can see a much deeper significance to her poem. We see how she depicted her father as a suffocating monster through figurative language. We also get deeper insight into the type of relationship, or rather lack of relationship between the two. Works Cited Plath, Sylvia. The Collected Poems. Ed. Ted Hughes. NewYork Harper Perennial, 1972.