Structure and Form
The poem repeats in quintains with meter and rhyme scheme resembling the style and structure of a nursery-rhyme:
You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.
Sylvia Plath, introducing the poem for a BBC radio reading shortly before her suicide, famously described the poem as about "a girl with an Electra complex. Her father died while she thought he was God.". Coupled with morbid imagery, the narrator's childlike intonation evokes a keen state of unease in the reader throughout the poem, climaxing in the final line "Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through".
Read more about this topic: Daddy (poem)
Famous quotes containing the words structure and/or form:
“The question is still asked of women: “How do you propose to answer the need for child care?” That is an obvious attempt to structure conflict in the old terms. The questions are rather: “If we as a human community want children, how does the total society propose to provide for them?””
—Jean Baker Miller (20th century)
“There is no doubt that the loftiest written wisdom is either rhymed or in some way musically measured,—is, in form as well as substance, poetry; and a volume which should contain the condensed wisdom of mankind need not have one rhythmless line.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)