Alekya Reddy

“And your Aryan eye, bright blue”: Sylvia Plath’s Use of World War II Imagery
“I made a model of you, a man in black with a Meinkampf look” (Daddy 64-65). A unique characteristic of Sylvia Plath’s poetry are her excessive use of symbolic imagery to convey her message, and represent deeper parallels within the poem. As in the poem Daddy, These images vary over a large spectrum; colors to animals to World War II. This use of imagery is heartrending and evokes positive and negative connotations throughout a poem. Plath is especially liberal in her use of Nazi Images from World War II. Images of fear, torture, and the massacre create a profound impact on the poems in which they appear, as in Daddy and Lady Lazrus, two of Sylvia Plath’s most celebrated, and most controversial poems. In the two poems Daddy and Lady Lazrus, Sylvia Plath uses World War II imagery to describe her father and her emotions concerning death; while the use of these images is exceedingly liberal to the point of theatrics.
Sylvia Plath’s father remained in her heart as a source of both inspiration and resentment after his tragic death. Many of her poems, concern him and his lack thereof of a presence in her life, and the void that she is trying to fill: none more significant than the poem Daddy. At the opening of the poem, she laments the death of her father, and his absence in her life “I used to pray to recover you” (Daddy 14). Her voice is not angry; however it conveys a message of repentance along with it. As the poem progresses, Plath beings to use Nazi Imagery towards her father, and her tone becomes more and more heated in regards to the Nazi she portrays as her father “I thought every German was you… I have always been scared of you With your Luftwaffe, and your gobbledygook. (Daddy 29-42). Her comparison of her father to a German officer is very conspicuous in the poem, and is metaphoric towards the anger she has at him for dying. Plath’s father died of Gangrene, a treatable condition which he neglected to take to a Doctor. After losing her father at a young age, Plath had never quite gotten over the incident, and as in the poem, blamed her father for leaving her when he could of still been there. However in her adult life, she began to realize the oppressive figure that her father was, and therefore uses a Nazi to exemplify this; and herself, a Jew. “Chuffing me off like a Jew. A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen” (Daddy 7). She turns herself as the victim of the situation, and her father the oppressor, in an analogy to World War II, in which she is a helpless person cast aside.
The excessive use of World War II can also be seen in poems in which Sylvia Plath describes the idea of Death. Sylvia Plath tried to commit suicide three times in her life, finally succeeding at the age of 30, her third try. “O my enemy. Do I terrify?---“ (Lady Lazrus 11-12). Her depiction of herself as a victim in this poem indicates that she feels sorry that she cannot quite complete her task. Furthermore, it shows how fraught she was to end her life. Her comparison of herself to a Jewish person who was killed during the Holocaust is metaphoric of the distaste she has for life at that point. She wanted to die to escape reality and her despair, and felt she was a victim of the incapability to do so “A sort of walking miracle, my skin Bright as a Nazi lampshade” (Lady Lazrus 4-5). Any Jew that was alive was a walking miracle in her opinion, and was marked for death by Nazi’s. After two previous tries to commit suicide, she considers herself an artist when it comes to death, and she uses the Holocaust to express the misery and torture of her circumstances.
The use of images in Sylvia Plath’s poetry is part of what makes her so remembered and celebrated today, despite her tumultuous and tragic life. Although much of her World War II is effective, it is also at times excessive and unwarranted. However, nonetheless, it does show us the intense feelings that she had about the world around her. The imagery in her poems invokes both symbolic and literal interpretations of her work, to see past the obvious and discern for ourselves the deeper meaning in each poem, and the parallels that show up between each of her poems. Her life’s legacy is not her suicide attempts, or her depression, or the tragic events that occurred, but her ability to express herself on a wide range literary feature; which brought us her most distinguished poetry.