Electra on Azalea Path?

I am supposed to interpret Silvia Plath%26#039;s %26quot;Electra on Azalea Path.%26quot; for my summer english class. I have never really been good at poetry. Does anyone have any insight to this interpretation?

Electra on Azalea Path?
It%26#039;s about Plath%26#039;s visit to her father%26#039;s grave. Her father, Otto Plath, died when Sylvia was eight. He was a diabetic but refused to acknowledge this (he thought he had cancer) and developed gangrene in his leg, and died.





On March 20, 1959, Plath visited her father%26#039;s grave. She kind of had a love-hate relationship with him: admired him greatly, but hated him for %26quot;leaving%26quot; her.





The first two stanzas are about her denying that he really died. She never actually saw his body, so in her childish mind he was stilll alive somewhere, or had returned to Heaven like the God he was in her mind. Seeing as he died when she was eight, the time frame fits (hibernating for twenty years). In this perfect world he did not die at all, or perhaps did not exist in the first place (%26quot;God-fathered into the world from my mother%26#039;s belly%26quot;). The third stanza describes the graveyard (the %26quot;charity ward, poorhouse%26quot; is also described in her Journals). In the fourth stanza, the lines in italics (%26quot;The day your slack sail...at your last homecoming.%26quot;) are about the Greek tragedy about Agamemnon, a hero from the Trojan War. He sacrificed his own daughter, Iphegenia, Electra%26#039;s sister, to be able to sail to Troy. Clytaimnestra, Iphegenia and Electra%26#039;s mother, and Agamemnon%26#039;s wife, killed him when he returned home from Troy. Plath herself has perhaps an Electra complex (she loved her father too much and hated her mother). In the last stanza there is of course the gangrene that killed Otto Plath. The suicide is Otto Plath%26#039;s death, which can be seen as a suicide as he refused to acknowledge that he had diabetes, a very treatable disease. %26quot;It was my love that did us both to death%26quot; is perhaps a childish notion that children have: they can control the world around them, even kill people. Therefore the young Sylvia Plath might have felt that she killed her father.





Hope this helps.
Reply:No, not really. Just try to write what it means to you and what you think it means to others and the author.



super nanny