Aggression Against Father in Poems of Roethke and Plath

The speaker is confessing in that passing play that there is something awe-inspiring, something horribly fascinating, about the fascist, the Nazi, the father who treats his daughter as a Nazi treated a Jew. However, the speaker's fear of and plague for her father blurs all subtlety of feeling. Even the aforementioned paradox, in which the speaker admits that she "adores" her cold, cruel father, is expressed in the same split up of brutal images which dominate the poesy. The speaker of Plath's rime is a adult woman openly expressing what she feels now, what she felt growing up infra her father's thumb, and what she feels now as she claims to have broken free. She curbms to this reader non to have changed her basic fear of, hatred for, and fascination with her terrific father.

In Roethke's poem, there is more subtlety because the heart of the poem is unspoken. This stands in stark contrast to Plath's poem in which each feeling---fear, hatred, adoration---is expressed bluntly and directly. Roethke's poem hides the fact of the child's material feeling. equitable as it is simplistic to say that "My Papa's Waltz" is a poem about the child's love for his father, so is it simplistic to say that it is a poem about the child's resentment toward his father. The reader, in order to see the subtlety of the poem, must

Roethke's poem is more compelling and involving because it suggests far more than it shows, while Plath's rage and nemesis in the face of her cliched Nazi father readily wears thin. We are conscious not of the real daughter and her father, only when rather of Plath's symbolic and psychological goals.

In Roethke, with a immobile and humble snapshot of a poem, we meet a real male child and his real father, and come away from the meeting with a sense of the jumble of feelings such a real boy would feel in that saltation.

put himself or herself in the specify of the child in the poem, not only with respect to the dance, nevertheless with respect to the entire relationship. This is a major difference in the two poems---Plath's deals with the entire lifelong relationship, while Roethke's deals with a narrow-minded or two. Roethke asks more of us because to understand the poem and the boy's military position toward his father we ourselves must take an interpretive risk and hang on a larger context for the relationship. If we consider that this man is in all probability an dry, then we can safely imagine that he is at least sometimes not as "loving" as he can be said to be in the dance in this poem. What happy boy refers to a dance with his father as hanging on "like devastation" (Roethke 598)? It is more potential that this dance is merely an example of the alcoholic father's happy side, and that he is just as often likely to be a
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