Daddy By Ted Hughes Analysis

In ‘Daddy’ by Sylvia Plath and The Bee King ‘by Ted Hughes, both poets create and build oppressive and icy imagery around a discourse of entrapment and captivity. Whilst Plath expresses a perception of the world that is underpinned by regret and let down, apprehension and anxiety, but perhaps finally freedom, Hughes expresses that same confused sense of regret and let down, apprehension and anxiety but without a final coming to terms or fixing of the problem. Both poets use twisted paternal images provoking unease in the reader. In both poems, the ports construct images of a father but one, which is in contrast to the reader’s expectation, as we believe a father to be protective, defensive and caring. Instead we are treated to images of neglect,

She opens with a disturbing and negative image, an accusation ‘You do not do, you do not do’ using repetition to underpin this tone of anger and resentment, with the image of a ‘black shoe’, perhaps suggesting the oppression of a school uniform but also something innocuous, inoffensive and unobjectionable but something that imprisons at the same time. She continues with imagery of oppression, using a simile, ‘in which I have lived like a foot for thirty years, poor and white’ suggesting something that is downtrodden and deprived too timid to either be seen or to

This coming out of the well is ominous and sinister with connotations of something menacing and threatening. The well itself, representative of oblivion and of being imprisoned. The odd link of the word ‘daddy’ is at odds with the contents, with a usual connection of this word to a childish world, albeit in this case disturbing and