Reflection

I read the poem several times in an attempt to understand the message in the poem. Each read provided me with greater understanding. In my initial reading, I believed the author to be a woman who grew up with a faciest father from Nazi. She descrives him as cruel and cold. The narrator tries to trace her lineage through her father’s ancestry. She comes to recognize that he is from Germany, but unsure of where. The reader is lead to conclude the narrators father was either a Nazi soldier or sympathetic to the faciest beliefs associated with Nazi Germany. The narrator uses allusion to make her point in the following lines It stuck in a barb wire snare.  Ich, ich, ich, ich,

 An engine, an engine  Chuffing me off like a Jew. A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.

The images in these allusions take the reader to concentration camps in WWII Germany and like her father to the oppressive requiem of that era. The narrator further characterizes the father as mean in the following lines which explicitly inite the father and leave the reader clear about the narrators feeling for her father.

Not God but a swastika  So black no sky could squeak through. Every woman adores a Fascist, The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you

Symbols Plath uses color and symbols to communicate the hurt and pain she feels as a result of the type of relationship she had with her father. Plath frequently used the color black to represent the mean nature of the father figure.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,  In the picture I have of you, <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 18.6667px;">A cleft in your chin instead of your foot <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 18.6667px;"> But no less a devil for that, no not <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 18.6667px;">Any less the black man who

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 18.6667px;"> Bit my pretty red heart in two.