Commentary on Daddy and The Arrival of the Bee Box By Sylvia Plath Essay Example for Free

Com workforcetary on soda water and The Arrival of the Bee street corner By Sylvia Plath EssaySylvia Plath was born in 1932 to Otto Plath, a German immigrant and Aurelia Plath, an American of Austrian descent. She had a very riotous life, suffering extreme depression and emotional trauma before she committed suicide in 1963 by putting her head into a gas oven. Most of her numberss reflect this distress and reveal the sorrows of her short life. The songs Daddy and The Arrival of the Bee recessful argon twain sad and gloomy poems which highlight many aspects of her life and maybe reason out why she was forced to kill herself. Both the poems argon directly or indirectly related to the two most important and influential men of Sylvias life- her make, and her husband Ted Hughes, who himself was a poet. She loved both men, but both of them dominated her and gave her pain and misery which made her life unhappy. As the title suggests, the poem Daddy is primarily about her fathe r, but many repairences are also made to Ted Hughes. The Arrival of the Bee Box is more about herself, but in spite of that the reader has to know the reputation of these two men to understand the poem completely and derive a meaning from it. Daddy highlights the relationship of Sylvia and her father.Sylvias father died when she was fulfilting ten. This was the time when she adored her father and his death meant a lot to her. But the poem shows the immense plague she has towards him as she gradually realized how he oppressed her and dominated her life. To use the word daddy as the title of the poem is in a way ironical because although the poem is about Sylvias father, the word doesnt fit in particularly well, as it is usually utilize in a positive way, non in a pessimistic and dark way. The poem has a lot of imagery, metaphors and similes which illustrates Sylvias anger towards her father and husband and gives the poem a dark intone.In the poem Sylvia has compared her fathe r to a black shoe while has called herself a foot living in it for thirty years. Usually a shoes job is to protect or comfort the foot, not to make it odour 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 such a profound and prejudicial psychological mark on her.The word black can be related to death and makes us think 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 loge 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 id ea of her thoughts being trapped inside(a) 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 hardhearted he was. She calls herself a Jew, indicating how he used his authority 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 soak up the situation. According to me her father must not have been as ruthless as Hitler. She has just used this comparison to express her immeasurable hatred towards him.She has further developed images of her father by calling 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 fathe r is dead, his character allow for torment her forever. The imagery of The Arrival of the Bee Box is also strong. We get a faint picture of the bees struggling in the dark box illustrating how Sylvia is thinking and feeling. We get a feeling that her thoughts are tormenting her and that she is in a disturbed 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 broken marriage with Ted Hughes. She might be feeling cheated as Ted Hughes left her for another 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 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 worship 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 power 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 say-so and fight back. In The Arrival of the Bee Box she shows that she has power when she says, Tomorrow I will be treacly 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.