Life and Death
All three poems represent some sort of growing that comes from maturing or getting older. Richard Wilbur’s “The Writer” talks about his daughter growing from a child to becoming a writer in which she enters “the sill of the world” (590). In “Packing for the Future: Instructions” Lorna Crozier talks about what one would experience when going into the future: “In your bag leave room for sadness” (673). Lastly Harry Thurston’s “Miracle” talks about his daughter picking a strawberry flower and his revelation that he is “awed by the miracle of what really happens” (684). The narrator realizes how amazing growing or transforming is and that it is quite a miracle.
Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy” seems to follow her own experience with her own dad, but with many differences. A small difference is that the narrator’s dad dies when the girl is ten, which for Plath she was eight at the time. In the poem she describes breaking bones to be with her father, which Plath was in a car accident (suicide attempt), but I am unsure if anything was broken. The narrator labels her father as a Nazi that she is ashamed of, and Plath’s real father was from Germany, but only known to be a professor of biology and not a part of the war efforts. I think that Plath choose to depict her father in a different light to reveal her emotions of him choosing to leave her at such a young age. I agree that a biography is just someone’s spin on things because how truthful can you be about someone when you don’t know what was in their mind or even the difference between fiction and fact. If I were to write a biography about you I would only know what you tell me and therefore it is not the entire picture. With all the things we know about Plath it doesn’t even compare to what she knew about herself, and if she all the misconceptions about her she would have to agree with me.