Daddy

Fonzy Noveron

Erin Teegarden

Intro to Poetry

2/24/2013

Daddy

“A series of words is chosen because it literally causes us to sputter and spit, stirring up memories and experiences from our personal past, reviving the emotion itself” says Karin de Weille in her essay about sound. Weille says that as we read poems we are turned into puppets “Our limbs are left alone, but inside where our vocal chords move, we’re dangled and swung. We’re made to dance-for grief, for joy. She claims that sound in a poem is like the advice: Smile to make your mood change to happiness, because sometimes the words in poems can trigger emotions. The poem “Daddy” by Sylvia Plath is a good example of how a poem can influence the way the reader feel and one that can evoke a lot of emotions; the tone that the poem has throughout and the sounds that it makes the reader do give off a creepy, scary and disturbing feeling.

The poem “Daddy” by Sylvia Plath is about a girl whose dad died. She admired her dad and looked up to him but she knew that he was not a good guy, he was a Nazi. Because the poem uses the voice of second person it makes it sound like the speaker is actually talking to her dad even though he is dead. The poem uses a lot of “uuu” sounds for example: “You do not do, you do not do”, “Black shoe”, “Achoo”, “Daddy, I had to kill you”, “I used to pray to you to recover you/ Ach, du.” The sound of “uuu” makes me think of ghosts and since the poem is about a dead father it is very likely that Plath purposely tried to pucker up the readers lips to make the “uuu” sound to symbolize ghosts and /or death. The lines that have the “uuu” in them usually end with it, this makes the reader slow down at the end and let that last word of the line gently and smoothly extend out the tongue. By the reader doing this with the last word of the line it makes the poem sound mysterious and creepy because the reader is mimicking the way that stereotypical ghosts “talk”; with extended words such as “I...