Seamus Heaney and Sylvia Plath are two contemporary poets from very different family backgrounds. Heaney grew up rooted in rural Ireland with a large close-knit family, while Plath grew up in a dislocated family with her mother and brother. His father died shortly after his eighth birthday. The different upbringings of these poets may be the reason why each of them portrays their fathers in very different ways in their work. Heaney's poems reflect his pride and admiration for his father's skill as a farmer, while Plath's poems show raw hatred towards his father. In fact, Plath even goes so far as to use the Holocaust as an extended metaphor, painting her father as an oppressive Nazi. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay However, despite the immediately apparent differences between the two poets' depictions of their fathers, there are subliminal feelings beneath the surface. Despite Heaney's avid admiration for his father and his skill as a farmer, Heaney's lack of skill as a farmer led him to break away from his peasant roots and establish himself as a poet. Meanwhile, Plath's relationship with her dead father is full of love and hate. She may hate her father because his absence from her life has led her to become an emotionally burdened adult, but she also displays feelings of love and longing for the father she never knew. From Plath's desperation to be with her father, her strong feelings of attachment emerge. In both "Follower" and "Digging", Heaney shows a tender admiration for his father and his skill as a farmer, and even goes so far as to attribute the skill to that of a god. In “Follower,” she watches her father plow the horse, “his shoulders swell like a taut sail.” The use of the adjective 'globed' recalls the image of Atlas, the almighty Titan who carried the heavens on his shoulders. Therefore, by comparing his father to Atlas, Heaney indirectly states that he sees his father as a divine being. The way his father controls the horses with his "clicking tongue" also suggests divine attributes. Heaney uses onomatopoeia when describing his father's "clicking tongue", to help the audience visualize his godly father at work. Heaney's zealous idolatry of his father strongly suggests feelings of attachment, but conversely this metaphor also establishes a separation between Heaney and his father, like the Greek gods who live atop Mount Olympus, looking down on the deadly. Heaney's conception of idolatry and the portrayal of a father as a distant deity is reflected in Plath's poem "Little Escape". In the first line of the eighth stanza, Plath declares that "the yew [is] my Christ", and assuming that the yew tree is a symbol representing her father, one can therefore conclude that she is stating that her father is the his personal god. "Little Fugue" is an exploration of a girl's feelings towards her dead father and attachment to him resulting from his early death during her childhood. This metaphor highlights Plath's strong attachment to her father. She worships him, prays for him, sacrifices and suffers in his own name and all of this behavior is by choice. In "Daddy", she makes more religious references, stating that she "prayed to heal [her father] because "[he] died before [she] had time." The verb "pray" indicates Plath's feelings towards her father .Plath praying for the absent father is not an unheard of idea, as psychologists have noted that many children tend to idolize absent parents. Additionally, the use of the verb"praying" also implies Plath's desperation to be with her father, as Plath remained ambivalent about religion throughout her life. With this in mind, her use of the pronoun "Christ" also reinforces the idea that Plath's father is her personal god that she could never meet face to face, but could only pray and believe in. Plath is attached to her father in the same way that people are attached to their gods. While gods can be a positive force in a person's life, they can equally be repressive and overbearing because to worship a god is to be subservient to that god's will. The ubiquitous yew tree in "Little Fugue" symbolizes Plath's father, and she presents the tree as an overbearing figure, trapping Plath in its overbearing shadow. He reveals this in stanzas 6 and 7: "What a dark funnel, my father!" I see your black and leafy voice, like in my childhood.' His father is the menacing yew tree and the adjective “black” reinforces the motif of darkness and death in the poem. The choice of the noun "funnel" also implies a sense of claustrophobia, because it creates the image of someone trapped in a dark, narrow space. Plath remains attached to her father, because he is the object of his idolatry, but at the same time she strives to detach herself from his influence due to his oppressive nature. Similarly, this image of a child overshadowed by his father is also evident in Heaney's "Follower", when he writes of constantly having to "follow [his father's] broad shadow around the farm". The adjective "large" highlights the idea that fathers are like gods, appearing powerful and imposing. Heaney feels fond of his father, because he wants to emulate him and "grow and plow" just like him, but instead he never stopped doing so. what he did was "follow his broad shadow around the farm." Unfortunately he accepts that he will never be like his father, instead he feels like a "nuisance, tripping, falling, always barking". The action of "barking" is a lexical choice that suggests how weak and small Heaney must have felt because that verb is often attributed to small, shrill dogs. This is in stark contrast to the word "broad", which Heaney uses to describe his father's shadow. However, later in the poem, the role is reversed and Heaney's father becomes the one "who keeps stumbling after [him] and won't go away". Heaney's father has now become a nuisance to the poet, and now he wants to break away from his father. However, Heaney cannot escape his father's influence and continues to follow him even as an adult. Heaney's feelings of attachment faded with age, as such feelings tend to do as children grow up and begin to forge their own identities. In Heaney's mind, he is not the great farmer his father is, so he instead chooses his own individual path and becomes a poet, no longer following his father's shadow on the farm. The adjective "stumbling," which Heaney previously used to describe his awkward mannerisms, he now uses to describe his ailing father's frail movements. Perhaps Heaney remains attached to his father because he has to care for his man out of family obligation, despite his desire to detach himself from him. Plath also plays on this idea of ​​concomitant feelings of attachment and detachment in 'Little Fugue'. The poem is an exploration of a girl's feelings about her dead father and how his presence in her life has made her weak, but conversely his death and absence have also made her emotionally incapacitated. Plath writes that she "sees [her father's] voice", rather than hearing it. Perhaps this overlap of his senses can be attributed to a kind of temporary synesthesia, which emphasizes his unbalanced mental state. This idea of ​​confused senses is also present in thePlath's reference to Beethoven, the German composer known for being deaf. Plath also describes herself as "lame in memory", probably due to the death of her father. This reinforces the fact that she remains attached to her father and that his death has left her emotions weak and her senses confused. He describes his father's voice as 'black and leafy... a hedge of yew rows', mixing images of the symbolic yew tree and the appearance of his father's voice as 'black and leafy'. The adjective 'black ” gives her father a dark, brooding character, and goes with the symbolism of the yew tree, which is supposed to represent death. Additionally, Plath metaphorically describes her father as a butcher who “cuts sausages” in a California delicatessen. verb 'lopping' is commonly used to describe the action of removing branches from a tree. Therefore, since the yew tree is a symbol representing Plath's father, it implies that his actions were self-destructive, which ultimately led to. to his death and, ultimately, to Plath's lame state. Even after his death, Plath continues to be haunted by a father whose barbaric ways continue to "color [her] sleep" into adulthood, leading her to remain attached to him despite her desire to detach herself from her tyrannical and destructive man. influence. Heaney experiences the same swirl of emotions, conflicting feelings of attachment and detachment, as he demonstrates in "Digging." Heaney describes a son or daughter's desire to become independent from the father, but the obligation makes it difficult to break the family attachment. Interestingly, the word "escape" (as in the title "Little Escape") has a dual definition. it connects to Plath's conception of the mixed senses. In musical terms, a fugue is a contrapuntal musical composition, which goes against Plath's personal brand of synesthesia. In psychiatric terms, a fugue is a state of temporary amnesia in which a person forgets their entire identity for a period of time. Thus, Plath's account of her variety of synesthesia and the numbing of her senses is an elaboration of the title of her poem, "Little Escape." His father's presence in his life was so detrimental to his state of mind that he lost all sense of his identity, and this absence further crippled his psyche. Heaney explores the idea of ​​identity in "Digging", where he constantly compares his lack of grace as a farmer to his father's skill and ability, and through these observations ultimately concludes that he has "no spade to follow men like them ", and instead it is found in poetry. By separating himself from his family and cutting away his "living roots" (as he writes in "Digging"), he is forging his own identity, which is the only way he will ever be able to detach himself from his father. Heaney also breaks his bond with his father by stating that he "digs" with the pen instead of digging with the spade like a farmer. In the seventh verse of "Digging", Heaney metaphorically breaks away from his traditional "roots", as Plath does when she assertively repeats that he "doesn't". Heaney writes about the cold smell of moldy potatoes. The potato is a staple food of the Irish people, and the adverb "cold" and the mold on the potato suggest that it is rotting and dying. Thus, Heaney's attempt to break away from his agricultural roots left the crops to rot. The hiss and onomatopoeia of “squelch and slap of soggy peat” reinforce the image of decay and putrefaction. Heaney was known for using onomatopoeia in his poems to recreate the sounds and atmosphere of farming. There is also alliteration wrapped up in this verse, “the clean cuts of an edge through living roots awaken in my head.” This particular line contains a double meaning and.