Link poems

Question 1

Widow - Sylvia Plath

Answer 1

• This poem is although autobiographical yet at the same time is universal. She has seen her mother experiencing pain just after the death of Otto Plath. Her father left his wife and daughter alone in the world; both were females and, in that society, as per assertion of Sylvia Plath, it is difficult for females to spend even a single peaceful day because of the male dominance.
• She cannot forget happy days of her life which she has spent with her husband. She becomes helpless and has no other choice except trying everyday to get rid of memories. In this way, a widow suffers twice.

Question 2

Mushroom - Sylvia Plath

Answer 2

Mushroom is metaphor for woman and every line of the poem is not about mushroom but about the struggles of women in the male dominated society.
• The over-arching metaphor is of women, as an oppressed group, represented by the characteristics of mushrooms — growing quietly and unobtrusively, but nonetheless emerging.

Question 3

Daddy

Answer 3

• It seems that she denotes hardships with many men, and her father was the initiator of these failed relationships.
• Definite sense of fear of men – ‘barely daring to breathe or achoo’
• Plath wrote about her father’s death that occurred when she was eight years old and her ongoing battle of trying to free herself from her father.
• Initially in “Daddy,” Plath idolizes her father, going as far as to compare him to God. However, as her poem progressed she would, later on, compare him to a swastika and what it symbolizes. Plath alludes to her father being a Nazi soldier and in contrast, compared herself to a Jewish prisoner.
• “Daddy,” portrayed the female figure in opposition to male authority. Narbeshuber argued the objectified female form had been previously displayed was now confronting and renouncing the oppressive and social as well as cultural norms that dehumanized women.

Question 4

World’s Wife

Answer 4

The collection takes characters, stories, histories and myths which focus on men, and, in Duffy’s renowned feminist way, presents them anew for the public to look at the women that were previously obscured behind the men.