Daddy – Sylvia Plath English Commentary Daddy is a confessional poem written by the famous American poet Sylvia Plath. The poem was written on October 12, 1962 shortly before her death. It gives the readers glimpses from her life and the poem can be said to be symbolic. The tittle “Daddy” symbolizes her father and Germany, its culture, people and the events that took place when the poem was written, ethnic cleansing and the killing of Jews. The poem gives us the views of the author, Sylvia Plath on the Nazis and their acts like mass killing of Jews on the name of Purity.
The relative popularity of “Daddy” can be attributed to Plath’s use of Imagery and the controversial use of Holocaust as metaphor. Many also believe “Daddy” to be a response of Sylvia Plath’s complex relationship with her father Otto Plath and her husband Ted Hughes. The poem “Daddy” by Sylvia Plath deals with a girl’s deep attachment to the memory of her father and the unhappiness it caused in her life. The poem can also be said as an outlet for Plath to deal with her father’s death or her husband’s betrayal.
The poem reads life a confessional story from the personal life of the author. Plath can be seen to reinvent the relationship as one between a Nazi and a Jew creating what can be said as an “oppressor-oppressed” dynamic, which was similar to what existed between her, and her father. Sylvia Plath herself called the poem to be based on a girl with Electra complex. The speaker, Plath creates a figurative image of her father using varied metaphors to describe her relationship with him.
She calls him like a black shoe the she had lived in, like a statue that stretches across the United states, like God who had the ultimate power, like a Nazi who was full of hatred and was stern, like a swastika and finally like a vampire who sucked her blood. The speaker, full of fear of her father represents herself as a Jew and her father as a hardcore Nazi. The poem shows the struggle of Plath showing that though his father was very strict and had the wrong perspective but she is through him now.
The tittle of the poem itself, “Daddy” is a metaphor for men in general and of evil. This poem is like a stake in the heart of her fathers disturbing memories that she wants to get rid off. It can be noted that reading tittle, the tone the poem might express would be of the love of a child towards their father but it is totally the second side of a coin. This can be said to be very ironic as this tittle is used to also symbolize Nazi’s, vampires, and devils. This shows us the internal fight in the reader for love and hatred towards her father.
The poem describes her feelings of oppression and her battle to come to grips with the issues of this power imbalance. The poem also conjures the struggle many women face in a male dominated society. The conflict of this poem is male authority and control versus the right of a female to be herself, to make choices, and be free of male domination. Plath’s conflicts begin in her relationship with her father and continue with her husband. The intensity of this conflict is extremely apparent as she uses examples that cannot be ignored.
The atrocities of NAZI’ Germany are used as symbols of the horror of male domination. The constant and crippling manipulation of the male, as he introduces oppression and hopelessness into the lives of his women, is equated with the twentieth century’s wars period. Words such as Luftwaffe, panzerman, and Mein Kampf look are used to describe her father and husband as well as all male domination similar to the dictatorship of Hitler then. The frequent use of the word black throughout the poem conveys a feeling of gloom and suffocation.
Like many women in society, we know that Plath felt oppressed and stifled throughout her life by her use of the simile “I have lived like a shoe for thirty years poor and white, barely able to breath or Achoo. ” The use of similes and metaphors such as “Chuffing me off like Jew. A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belson. ” and “I think I may well be Jew” clearly shows the feelings of anguished hopelessness and the ripping agony she must have felt. The agelessness of this poem can be guaranteed, as there will always be women who feel the same torture that is described.
Strong images are conveyed throughout the poem. The words “marble- heavy, a bag full of God” conveys he omniscience of her father’s authority and the heaviness it weighed on her throughout her life. “The vampire who aid he was you, and drank my blood for a year, seven years if you want to know” describe her husband and the ability of male power to strip a person of their own sense of themselves. Daddy by Sylvia Plath has been written in a confessional style of Poetry. The poem gives us both direct and indirect glimpses of life from the life of the author.
She is seen to confessing about some striking events that happened in her life. Sylvia Plath had a very sad childhood with her father dying at the age of 8 and her marriage too was not successful with Ted Hughes who was known to have a few extra-marital relationships. As can be seen from the line “I have lived like a foot, for thirty years poor and white” which shows her suffering in her childhood and her relationship with her father. The poem is written in stanzas containing five lines each. These lines remind us of a Mike Tyson jab, short but extremely powerful.
An example of this “If I’ve killed one man I’ve killed two– The vampire who said he was you”. The powerful imagery of these lines overpowers any of the rhyme scheme. Even without the presence of a formal rhyme scheme, the poem has a lot of internal rhymes and ends. Reading through the poem, an “oo” sound can be found which might seem very premature but plays an important role in the poem by creating a background that is overwhelming and shows the frustration of Plath. We can say that the poem is glued together by meanings, rhymes and various repetitions.
The readers can see that there exist a lot of iambic rhyme giving the poem a feel of lilting and rhythmic and sometimes also singsong-y. A glimpse of this can be felt in the lines, “The boot in the face, the brute. Brute heart of a Brute like you”. Just like rhyme plays a big part in this poem without having a specific scheme, rhythm is important here even though it doesn’t fit into a specific pattern. There is a lot of iambic verse, which means that the line is patterned by unstressed syllables followed by stressed syllables.
Let’s look at line 1 as an example, “You do not do, you do not do. ” We can say that the poem feels like a nursery rhyme but is full up to the brim with sorrow and unhappiness that was present in Plath’s life, which she has conveyed with her writing. Sylvia Plath has used a strong and fascinating diction as it conveys her feelings and keeps the readers interested. The poem opens with childlike language and gradually the language and the words used develop which seem to depict the time phrase of her life from childhood to her suicidal death.
Plath has a unique choice of words, which are sometime rhetorical and satirical and can sometimes turn out to be direct and beholding great emotions. The world like “Achoo” which are very child like shows the age of the speaker to the authors and hence her development of ideas. Plath can be said to have many contrasting ideas, which are reflected to the readers by words like “Marble-heavy, full of God” which are totally opposite of each other, jumbled up but still clearly shows what the author is feeling. This poem shifts settings and most of them are metaphorical.
So, instead of being in an actual place, we’re taken from place to place in the speaker’s mind. The setting in her mind starts out as the black shoe in which the speaker claims to live, but which is actually a metaphor for her father with the color black symbolizing his evilness and his bad behavior/thinking. Then it moves to encompass the whole of the United States, mentioning San Francisco seals and the beautiful waters of a Massachusetts beach. This setting seems like it should be beautiful, but then we remember that there’s a statue of the speaker’s dead father across the entire United States.
Then we move to a place that is in Poland and where German is spoken, that seems to be the place from which the speaker’s father emigrated. We hear that this town has been destroyed by war, and the beauty of the beach from earlier in the poem is lost to the desolation of battle. But, since this town has a common name which Plath does not remember as she was a small child during the time, we can’t know which specific town the speaker is talking about. Then, the poem is in Germany, but jumps back in time to World War II, and the speaker is on a train across the German countryside.
Sylvia Plath thinks and makes the readers think with her that she is headed to a concentration camp. Perhaps on a train, she sees the mountains of the Tyrol range, at the border of Austria and Italy, and thinks of Vienna, in Austria. We hear a lot about World War II – there are air forces, tanks, and her father turns into a Hitler-like character. There’s even a swastika that blots out the sky. This part of the setting is sinister. She compares her relationship with her father to a similar one that existed then between a Jew ad a Nazi as they were not too close to each other in their thinking though Plath did love her father a lot.
The transformation of settings shows the haph-hazardness in the relation between Sylvia and her father Otto and the confusion in her thoughts. By the end of the poem, Plath takes shows the readers to be in a village, which, potentially is just a part of a devilish place. The villagers are celebrating the death of a vampire, which gives us an idea of the kind of small town this is – full of suspicion and mysticism. So, courtesy of our speaker’s dark imagination, we’ve journeyed from the US to Germany, then back in time to World War II, and then even farther, to a mystical time when villagers believed in vampires.
Daddy being an extremely rich poem has in it a lot of themes. The poem not only talks about her relation with her father and husband but also beholds many great thoughts within it. One such theme, hidden in the background is mortality. The speaker of “Daddy” is obsessed with mortality, her father’s mortality, and her own. When the speaker’s father dies, she sees killing herself as a way to a way to obtain freedom from his dreadful memories and thoughts. She also declares that she has to kill him. This poem explores the paradoxes of death, the afterlife, and memories of the past.
After all, “Daddy” is addressed to a dead person. The death of the speaker’s father has haunted her for her entire life causing her to seek her own death. Plath feels that the only way to rid herself of the haunting memories and thoughts of her father is to metaphorically kill him and his thoughts. The poem “Daddy” is addressed to someone who is dead, incorporating in the poem a supernatural effect. This goes even further with the author placing in the presence of vampires, devils, and a statue that crosses the entire United States. The supernatural elements of this poem make it eerie, and fascinating to read.
The speaker of this poem’s emotions are supernatural themselves as they are so complex and intense that the supernatural must be used to convey them. The speaker’s comparison of her husband and father to Hitler, vampires, and devils makes not only these men, but also Hitler, seem like a vampire and a devil. The poem is very metaphorical & satirical but it is due to such comparisons only that the readers are able to understand the depth of the feeling of Sylvia Plath. Throughout “Daddy” the speaker in entrapped by memories of her father.
This can be seen from the start of the poem itself as Plath says that she feels she has been living like a foot in a shoe, a metaphor for the confinement that she’s been placed in by her father and his memories which also relates to her having Electra complex. Another one of “Daddy’s” main themes can be derived from the tittle of the poem itself. “Daddy” is not only an exploration of the speaker’s relationship with her father and husband, but of women’s relationships with men in general. The poem written by Sylvia Plath uses a lot of literary devices and is extremely content rich.
The poem not only gives us glimpses from the author’s life but in many ways talks about various themes. It was written in the 1960s, a time when feminists fought for women’s rights and made big progress in the way that gender was viewed in society. Though this poem does not address feminism blatantly, it is a powerful statement from a female against males. It’s not limited to addressing one male, but any male who has suppressed, betrayed, or, perhaps worst of all, died and left behind their daughters and wives. The imagery in this poem is conflicted, showing that the speaker’s emotions towards her father are hateful, but also mournful.
This poem applies to all men, and not just the speaker’s father, because of the metaphors and imagery that connect both the father and the husband to violence and war. The metaphors used by Sylvia plath play a major role in the poem as strong metaphors are conveyed throughout the poem like shoes feet can be said to be recurrent images in the poem. In the line, “Any more black shoe In which I have lived like a foot For thirty years, poor and white” we can see the speaker compare herself to a foot that is trapped and lives in a shoe for a long time and here the shoe was the father.
In the poem the shoe is shown as a trap that I smothering the foot and not giving it any freedom. The use of color description by Plath for the shoe; black suggests to the readers an idea of death and as the shoe fits tight on the feet it can be imagined to be like a coffin. The imagery used in the poem helps the readers relate to Plaths life that was full of difficulties. In the lines “A cleft in your chin instead of your foot.. But no less a devil for that” we can see the reference o the foot of the father and his origins.
This is developed further with images of the father and her hudband who is like the father being a vampire where Plath calls her father a blood sucking vampire in the lines “The vampire who said he was you.. and drank my blood for a year.. seven years if you want to know”. The tone of the poem is overall sad. The poem’s tone starts like a child and ends up frustrated and engulfed with anger. The poem sounds like an adult outraged in anger. The tone of the poem changes towards the end from being childlike to that of a strong determined women.
The last two stanzas in the poem demonstrate the attitude of power plath had. She has overcome her powers and killed all the self doubt inside of her and is illustrating her the power she has gained over the memories of her father. She is now seen to be confident enough to speak directly to her adversary. The ending line “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, im thorugh” complements the above stanzas and not only gives the poem a strong ending but shows that Sylvia Plath has achieved her aim by conquering her memories of her father showing that she has finally reached freedom.
The careful use of diction and use of words like “Achoo” and “gobbleydegoo” shows the evolution in the life of the poet herself as in the early paragraphs of the poem we can see use of mild language with little use of literary devices making it obvious to the readers of her being young but as the poem develops, Plath throws in heavy words like “bastard” shows her physical as well as mental maturity.
The poem can be said to relate with most of the audience who had lived in the past Deutschland and even many people today as it makes them think about their relation with theirs fathers and makes us realize the importance of the good relations we have with our parents. The “daddy” makes us feel fortunate of having a happy childhood unlike that of Sylvia Plath that was full of sorrow and despair.
Daddy is a sad, negative and a dark poem overall. Plath’s vivid use of imagery, metaphors, rhyme, tone simile as major poetic devices are able to clearly convey her message to the audience that in the the end she got freedom and was able to evoke great amount of power within the audience. She finishes the poem with a strong line that impacts the audience the most.
