'Daddy' Poem by Sylvia Plath
About 'Sylvia Plath'
Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) is a significant American confessional poet from the post World War II period. Born in Boston on 27 October 1932, she was the child of Otto Plath, a German emigrant who became a professor of Biology at Boston University, and Aurelia Schober, an American of Austrian-Jewish descent. The death of her father whom she worshipped, when she was only nine, was a traumatic event in her childhood and figured as an obsession in her poetry. While at Cambridge, she married the British poet Ted Hughes in 1956. She attended Robert Lowell's poetry classes at Boston University, and was further encouraged to write confessional poetry. She suffered from a nervous breakdown and was hospitalised several times. She tried to commit suicide thrice. Finally on 11 February 1963, she succeeded in taking her life, while she was at the height of her creative powers. What marks her poetry as uncommon is her total honesty, commitment to life and her striking use of imagery. The Colossus, her first book of poems was published in 1960. A novel based on her life, The Bell Jar, appeared in 1963. But most of her poems were published posthumously.
Plath's 'Daddy' is certainly one of the most striking poetic achievements of the confessional mode. Written in the autumn of 1962 the poem is a dramatic monologue in which a daughter verbally kills her father. A fantasy created out of the poet's obsessive belief that her father's pure Prussian ancestry could have made him a Nazi and her mother's Jewish background might have consigned her to a concentration camp, the poem develops this psychological tension in dramatic terms. Suffering from an 'Electra complex', the girl simultaneously hates and admires her father. The conflicting emotions restrict and dwarf her life to such an extent that she must get rid of the situation by killing him. First she tries to join him through suicide and later through marriage to a man who shares many of her father's qualities. 'Daddy' is a classic example of how the poet converts the private into the public, the personal into the universal. Though a confessional poem, 'Daddy' transcends the confessional mode by universalising its theme through its use of rhyme and rhythm, conversational tone and unsettling humour and violent imager.
'Daddy' Poem
You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.
Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time_______
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one grey toe
Big as a Frisco seal
And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.
In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend
Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.
It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene
An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.
The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.
I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat moustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You
Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.
You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who
Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.
But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look
And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I'm finally through.
The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through.
If I've killed one man, I've killed two_____
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.
There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.
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