Sylvia Plath employs vivid imagery and a reminiscent tone to convey her feelings of grief, guilt, and disdain the day she first visited her father’s grave, and the devastating effects his death had on her. Plath addresses the poem to her deceased father, of whom she harbors a deep daughterly love for, along with a bitterness created when he seemingly abandoned her and her mother when he died. Several times throughout the poem, Plath conveys how she feels as if her father’s death had killed her as well. Before her father’s death, Plath, a nave child, “had nothing to do with guilt or anything”. She relays the monotonous comfort her life had before his death, when “everything took place in a durable whiteness”. When Otto Plath, Sylvia’s father, dies, she feels as if she has descended “into the dirt, into the lightless hibernaculum” along with her father, shed of her “dress of innocence”. Plath disdainfully depicts the melancholy scene of Azalea Path, where the site of her father’s tomb, “[engraves]” itself upon her mind so deeply that in her poem she recalls each image down to the very detail. The bleak setting of Azalea Path, a “poorhouse, where the dead crowd foot to foot, head to head,” is the place her father resides underneath a “speckled stone askew by an iron fence” underneath “six feet of yellow gravel”. Azalea Path leaks dreariness, a place where “no flower breaks the soil” and the “ersatz petals drip…red” in the “rains.” Plath’s disdain is evident when she comes to the bitter realization that her father, whom she both loves and hates for leaving her, is buried here with the poor, as if his life had no more significance than a pauper.Plath conveys her mother as an image that readily accepts her husband’s death, “[dreaming him] face down in the...
