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, structure and/or form:
“With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and definite hardening of the paragraphs.”
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“The structure was designed by an old sea captain who believed that the world would end in a flood. He built a home in the traditional shape of the Ark, inverted, with the roof forming the hull of the proposed vessel. The builder expected that the deluge would cause the house to topple and then reverse itself, floating away on its roof until it should land on some new Ararat.”
—For the State of New Jersey, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“The world is not looking for servants,—there are plenty of these,—but for masters, men who form their purposes and then carry them out, let the consequences be what they may.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)