Father Poems

I enjoyed reading and comparing the two poems "Daddy" by Sylvia Plath and "Photograph of my Father in his Twenty-Second Year" by Raymond Carver. I sensed resentment for the father in the words of both of the authors. I tend to have a hard time analyzing poetry but for these two poems I was able to find multiple possible meanings and themes. The end line of Carver's poem, "Father, I love you, yet how can I say thank you, I who can't hold my liquor either, and don't even know the places to fish?" kind of tied to poem together for me. I took from the poem that the son resents his father for being a drunk or alcoholic when he was a child and passing the trait down to him. As a child the father never did father-son things with the son, which is shown in the fish line. The father may have never figuratively or literally took the son fishing or never taught him what fathers should teach their sons, making the son resent the father.

For me, Sylvia Plath's poem was a little bit harder to interpret. When I first started reading the poem I didn't pick up on the fact that the relationship with the father was negative. Plath used many symbols of her negative relationship with her father. For example, "An engine, an engine, Chiffing me off like a Jew. A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen. I begin to talk like a Jew. I think I may well be a Jew," showed that she was comparing her father to a Nazi. She felt she was a prisoner or outcast to her father or maybe was abused by her father. The author then begins to talk about the fact that she married her father. This may mean she married someone like her father that was abusive. The main repetition in the poem was the line, "Daddy, I have had to kill you." She then begins to talk about killing two people: her father and husband. This was because they both were abusive. She says she is through with both of them in the end. I'm not sure whether she actually killed them or just "left" them and killed was a symbolism but the poem had a very powerful theme because many people say they "marry their dad"meaning they marry a man similar to their father.