As a poet Sylvia Plath has been renowned for her style of writing and the power she evokes from her ideas in her poems. The themes of her poems tend to be of a negative nature with war, death and the problem of patriarchal societies as such topics. One of Plath's most famous pieces of poetry is Daddy. The poem focuses on Plath's father, a man who left her at an early age resulting in a burning hatred on her behalf for him. Daddy is an example of Plath's dark and gloomy work and also displays her common poetic devices of vivid imagery, metaphors, similes and irregularity throughout her poems.
             Ideally everybody deserves to grow up with two living parents, however Plath was not given this opportunity as her father died when she was only eight. In the poem Daddy, Plath, as the speaker, is having a one-way conversation with her father expressing all her feelings, anguish and how she tried to compensate for his death. The poem itself bares no metaphorical reading, only a literal reading which is broken up into three parts.
             A common technique that Plath uses in her poetry is the metaphor. An example lies within the first stanza of Daddy. "Any more, black shoe, In which I have lived like a foot, For thirty years, poor and white, Barely daring to breathe or Achoo." Here the persona uses the simile "like a foot" to compare herself to a foot. Metaphorically she is describing how she has had to live her life without her father, entrapped in black sadness like how a foot is tightly enclosed within a shoe. The reader is positioned to see that life can become very grim growing up without an important figure in a person's life such as their father.
             The second part of Daddy deals with World War II, a prominent event in recent history, but was a negative one as it was filled with destruction, bloodshed and trauma. Firstly to set the scene vivid imagery is used. The phrases "It stuck in a barb wire snare" and "
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