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:
“A structure becomes architectural, and not sculptural, when its elements no longer have their justification in nature.”
—Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918)
“The form of act or thought mattered nothing. The hymns of David, the plays of Shakespeare, the metaphysics of Descartes, the crimes of Borgia, the virtues of Antonine, the atheism of yesterday and the materialism of to-day, were all emanation of divine thought, doing their appointed work. It was the duty of the church to deal with them all, not as though they existed through a power hostile to the deity, but as instruments of the deity to work out his unrevealed ends.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)