Daddy by Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plat is a poet who is well recognized for writing “Daddy,” one of the most controversial holocaust poems. Nonetheless, some section of the controversy over her poem daddy is somewhat demographic. Sylvia is an American who is not connected to the holocaust autobiographically. Her father was a German but had nothing to do with the Nazis. In her poem, Sylvia has generally used holocaust and some genocidal activities against the Jewish people as an allegorical megaphone. By using similes in one of the stanzas like “Cuffing me off like a Jew.. to Auschwitz, Belsen, Dachau” add details to her psychological atrocities with her father (Ladin, 2006). It is common for non-Jewish poets to characterize the holocaust. Still, her case is quite outstanding because she has used it to minimize the orderly assassination of millions to express her confessions. The inclusion of the holocaust depicts how some of its terms have been integrated into everyday communication. It also recognizes the conflict between the rhetorical type and the contents of the holocaust. Concerning the big picture of the holocaust, the poem not only shows the insecurities of Sylvia’s association with German Jews, but it provokes readers to be angry with the alteration of “Dachau, Belsen, Auschwitz” into a personal tropify (Schiff 1995). This elucidates as to why Sylvia had personal umbrage with her father that is explicated by the holocaust. The effectiveness of this poem is that it highlights how German Jews do not want to be identified with their assassinators. This is because the exterminators buried the identity of the Jewish people and are portrayed in the line, “I began to talk like a Jew.”
Leaving You by Lily Brett
Lily Brett is an award-winning essayist, poet, and novelist from Australia. She lived in London for more than twenty years, stayed in Melbourne for three years, and permanently moved to New York City. Many of her writings is concerned with her Jewish bloodline and her feelings regarding the holocaust. One of her notable works is the poem “leaving you,’ which is the most personal and heartfelt writings which amplify strong feelings that have made it intricate for the poet to complete sentences. The stanzas have been separated by white spaces that bear out the guilt that cannot be expressed by the “daughter of the survivor.” The dramatizing effects of every word in the poem pinpoint Lily’s reaction to the horrifying details of the holocaust. The lines in the poem “I thought I knew Nazis” and “I thought I had lived with fear” depicts the wrong impressions the author had for quite some time (Ladin, 2006). She realized that Nazis were brutal and unsympathetic in the way they acted upon the Jewish people. Lily even thought that by possessing work permits and cards, she had already felt what fear was, but that was nothing compared to how the Jews lived. Whatever she was experiencing was just the tip of an iceberg, and it was clear to her that Jews went through a lot of catastrophic moments. Consequently, concerning the big picture of the holocaust, the poem “leaving you” beckons us to mourn with the affected people and throw tantrums at the perpetrators (Schiff, 1995). Ultimately the effectiveness of this poem is that it deflects from ourselves to our subjects and eases our intense pain to boredom.