“Daddy”

Sylvia Plath is most known for her tortured soul. Perhaps that is why readers identify with her
works of poetry so well, such as ‘Daddy’. She has an uncanny ability to give meaningful words
to some of the most inexpressible emotions. She writes in a way that allows the reader to feel
her pain. In this poem, ‘Daddy’, she writes about her father after his death. This is not a typical
obituary poem, lamenting the loss of the loved one, wishing for his return, and hoping to see him
again. Rather, Plath feels a sense of relief at his departure from her life. She explores the
reasons behind this feeling in the lines of this poem.

When speaking about her own work, Plath describes herself (in regards to ‘Daddy’ specifically)
as a “girl with an Electra complex. Her father died while she thought he was God”. She adds on
to this statement, describing her father as “a Nazi and her mother very possibly part Jewish”.
Through the poem, she “has to act out the awful little allegory once before she is free of
it.”Literary historians have determined that neither of these statements about her parents was
accurate but were introduced into the narrative in order to enhance its poignancy and stretch the
limits of allegory.

"Daddy" is a poem written by American confessional poet Sylvia Plath. The poem was written
on October 12, 1962, four months before her death and one month after her separation from
Ted Hughes. It was published posthumously in Ariel during 1965 alongside many other of her
poems leading up to her death such as "Tulips” and "Lady Lazarus."
"Daddy" employs controversial metaphors of the Holocaust to explain Plath's complex
relationship with her father, Otto Plath, who died shortly after her eighth birthday as a result of
undiagnosed diabetes. The poem itself is cryptic, a widely anthologized poem in American
literature, and its implications, as well as thematic concerns, have been reviewed academically,
with many differing conclusions.
Before her publication of Ariel, Plath had been a high academic achiever attending Cambridge
University in England. It was at Cambridge University where she met Ted Hughes, a young
Yorkshire poet, and they wed in the summer of June 1956. However, their marriage was
short-lived as Hughes had been having an affair with another woman which caused him and
Plath to separate. After her separation from Hughes, Plath moved with her two children into a
flat in London during December 1962 and where "Daddy" was written. Shortly after, Plath died
by suicide by consumption of sleeping pills and gas inhalation by putting her head in a gas oven
on February 11, 1963.

However, before Plath’s death, beginning in October 1962, Plath wrote at least 26 of the poems
that would be published posthumously in the collection Ariel. In these Plath wrote about anger,
including macabre humor, and resistance in "Daddy." Yet at the same time, she contrasted those
dark subject matters with themes of joy, in hand with a deeper understanding of the numerous
hindering functions of women. "Daddy" included humor and realistic subject matter that would,
later on, be known as the "October poems." The “October poems” were composed of Plath’s
anger as a woman who felt oppressed by her parents' expectations of her, society’s hindering
roles in place for women, and by her ex-husband’s unfaithfulness. Plath’s anger had been
voiced in her later poems including "Lady Lazarus" and "Daddy."

The speaker begins the poem by addressing the circumstances in which she lives, saying that
they are simply no longer adequate. She compares herself to a foot living inside a black shoe.
For 30 years she has lived this way, deprived and without color, not even having the courage to
breathe or sneeze.

The speaker then addresses her father, informing him that she has had to kill him, though she
then says that he actually died before she had the chance to do so. She describes her father as
being heavy as marble and like "a bag full of God," as well as like a horrifying statue with one
toe that looks like a San Francisco seal—huge and gray.

Continuing the image of her father as a statue, the speaker describes his head being located in
the bizarre blue-green waters of the Atlantic Ocean, near the beautiful coastal town of Nauset,
Massachusetts. The speaker tells her father that she used to pray for his return from the dead,
and then in German says, "Oh, you."

The speaker prayed in the German language, in a town in Poland that was utterly destroyed by
endless wars, a town whose name is so common that the speaker's Polish "friend"—whom she
refers to using a derogatory slur—says there must be at least twelve of them.

Because of this, she couldn't tell where her father had been, nor where exactly he came from.
She couldn't talk to him. It felt as though her tongue kept getting caught in her jaw.

It was as though her tongue were stuck in a trap made of barbed wire. The speaker stutters the
word "I" in German, demonstrating what it felt like to not be able to speak. She thought every
German was her father. She thought the language was offensive and disgusting.

The speaker continues describing the German language, saying that it was like the engine of a
train, carrying her off like a Jew to a concentration camp. She began speaking like a Jew, and
then started thinking that she might in fact be a Jew.

The speaker, perhaps still imagining herself on this train, then describes the Austrian state of
Tyrol and the beer of Austria's capital city as being impure and false. She then lists the other
things that might make her Jewish: her Romani ancestry, her strange luck, and her tarot cards.

She has always been afraid of her father in particular, whom she associates with the German air
force and who spoke words that seemed impressive at first but turned out to be nonsense. She
goes on to describe his carefully groomed mustache and his blue, Aryan eyes, and then refers
again to his link to the German military, this time invoking the armored vehicles used in WWII.
The speaker addresses her father as "Oh, You" again, but this time in English.
Again describing her father, the speaker claims that he is not God after all, but rather a
swastika—the symbol of the German Nazi regime, so opaque that no light could get through it.
She then goes on to say that all women love Fascists, being stepped on brutally by someone
who is a monster at heart.

The speaker then recalls a photograph of her father where he is standing in front of a
blackboard. In the picture one could see that he has a cleft chin, but the speaker implies that he
has the cleft feet of a devil as well. The speaker decides that her father is in fact a devil, as was
the wicked man who tore her passionate heart into pieces.

The speaker was 10 years old when her father died. When she was 20, she tried to commit
suicide so that she could finally be reunited with him. She thought even being buried with him
would be enough.

The suicide attempt was unsuccessful, however, as she was discovered and forced into
recovery. The plan having failed, she came up with another. She made a model of her father, a
man in black who, like her father, looked the part of a Nazi.

This man had a love of torture. She married him. The speaker, directly addressing her father
again, claims she's finally through. The telephone's unplugged and no one will be getting
through to her.

The speaker reckons that if she's killed one man, she's in effect killed two. She refers to her
husband as a vampire, saying that he drank her blood for a year, no, seven years. She then tells
her father he can lie back now.

There's a sharp wooden post, the kind used to kill vampires, stuck through her father's heart.
The speaker imagines a village in which the locals never liked her father, and so they are
dancing and stomping on his body because they always knew exactly what he was. The
speaker deems her father despicable and again tells him that she's finished.

Themes

Gender and Oppression

The poem's speaker has been enthralled by her father since childhood yet comes to realize that
his legacy is one of violence and oppression. She spends the poem breaking free from his hold
over her, but the poem is not solely about this one, specific relationship. Instead, the speaker’s
relationship to her father’s memory can be thought of as representative of the broader power
imbalance between men and women in a patriarchal society, or a society in which men hold
most positions of political, social, and moral authority. The poem implies that such a world
subjects women to repressive rules and violence at the hands of men, limiting their autonomy,
self-expression, and freedom.
The first indication that the poem is addressing patriarchy is through its title. By addressing
“Daddy” (rather than “father” or “dad”), Plath immediately sets up a dynamic in which a male
figure is venerated, literally located at the top of the poem, while the female speaker is
infantilized; she is an adult addressing her father with a child’s vocabulary, trying to
communicate with him through the sing-song cadence of a nursery rhyme.

The speaker then describes the oppressive shadow of her father's memory by comparing
herself to a foot that has lived inside a “black shoe ... for thirty years,” too scared to even
breathe. In other words, she has been completely smothered by the presence of her father, who
is further described as a colossal statue, heavy as "marble" or "a bag full of God." All of these
descriptors emphasize the sheer weight and breadth of the speaker's father even in memory,
which seems to press down upon the speaker years after his death. This speaks to his personal
hold on her, but also to the figurative force of the oppression faced by women in a
male-dominated world.

Because of this oppression, the speaker has felt unable to communicate with, let alone stand up
to, her father throughout her life. Not only has she "Barely dar[ed] to breathe" for thirty years, but
her "tongue" has been "stuck in [her] jaw ... in a barb wire snare." This image emphasizes the
sheer violence of her father's hold over her, which denies her any ability to express herself. The
poem thus presents the inability to communicate as one clear byproduct of oppression.

Throughout the poem the speaker also explicitly conflates her father with the Nazis and begins
to identify herself with the Jewish people—a response that reveals her feelings of utter
powerlessness against her father. The Nazis were Fascists—authoritarians who violently
squashed any dissent—and this controversial comparison is meant to again highlight the
brutality of her father's presence.

Indeed, the speaker even makes the extreme, seemingly offhand comment that “Every woman
adores a Fascist.” This not only draws attention to the power imbalance between men and
women but also to the normalization of violence against women—violence that is so woven into
every aspect of society that women can only be seen to “adore” their oppressors. In other
words, this oppression is so commonplace, so accepted, that it is hard for victims to even
recognize it, let alone fight back.

To that end, the speaker makes “a model” of her father and marries him. The husband is
described as having “a Meinkampf look” and “a love of the rack and the screw,” two images that
attest to his violent and oppressive nature. This husband also becomes a "vampire," draining
the speaker of blood for seven years—a metaphor for the way marriage, under patriarchy, robs
a woman of any life of her own. Moving from her father to another man has done nothing to free
the speaker because she is still living within an oppressive world that treats her as subservient
to the men in her life.

Only in recognizing the patriarchal violence and oppression present in her marriage and
asserting that she’s “finally through” can the speaker metaphorically drive a stake through her
father’s heart. In other words, she is not only freeing herself of her oppressive marriage but of
the kind of gendered dynamic modeled to her by her father.

Power and Myth-Making

“Daddy” deals with the deification and mythologizing of authority figures. It does this through the
lens of the speaker’s individual relationship with her father as well as through the historic lens of
the Holocaust. In order to see her father clearly, for who he really was, the speaker first needs to
puncture her godlike image of him.

Having lost her father to illness at a young age, the speaker develops an obsession with him
that follows her into adulthood. The speaker’s father “died before [she] had time—” to see him
for who he really was, and because of this the speaker has been trapped inside a childlike
perception of her father as godlike. Over the years, her memory of him seems only to have
grown in its oppressive power, and she realizes she must destroy her godlike image of him in
order to be free. She thus confesses to her father that she has had to “kill” him—or rather, the
idea of him which has held her in thrall.

To do so is difficult, however. The speaker struggles to see her father clearly, saying “I never
could tell where you / Put your foot, your root.” This image illustrates both her father's vague
identity in the speaker's mind and the speaker’s sense of his omnipresence, his godlike ability to
be everywhere at once—"I thought every German was you.” This difficulty in pinpointing the
man while also being surrounded by the myth of him speaks to her growing understanding that
to see him clearly would rob him of his power over her.

The speaker goes on to compare her relationship with her father to the relationship between
Jewish people and Nazis during the Holocaust. This comparison not only illuminates her own
struggle but illustrates the ways in which power and authority are vulnerable to people’s belief in
them.

The speaker describes being scared of her father’s “Luftwaffe” and “gobbledygoo”—on the one
hand, the very real physical force represented by the Luftwaffe (the German air force), and on
the other hand, the mythology broadcast by their propaganda system, a mythology that—when
looked at closely—was nothing but gobbledygoo (nonsense).

She also fears her father’s “Aryan eye, bright blue.” The singular use of “eye” refers more to a
watchful, authoritarian presence than to a literal pair of eyes. Likewise, during WWII people
were paralyzed by the thought of attracting Nazi attention, behaving every moment as if they
were being watched, thus reinforcing Nazi control. Recognizing the fallacy of her father’s
power—"Not God," an actual deity, "but a swastika," an empty symbol—the speaker invokes the
symbol of the Nazi regime, underlining the fact that in order for a symbol of authority to work, it
has to be “So black no sky could squeak through.” In other words, it must block out all light,
hope, and truth. The moment one begins to see through the illusion, to the truth of what’s behind
it, the symbol loses its power.
Thus only when the speaker is finally able to see her father for who he is, to puncture her
illusion of him as a godlike authority, does she free herself of his power. The speaker describes
a picture she has of her father in which he stands at a blackboard, apparently teaching a class,
a picture which points to his supposed authority. The speaker, however, finally recognizes that
he is “No less a devil” just because the image conceals his true nature. The poem ends with the
speaker asserting her freedom—“Daddy, daddy, you bastard I’m through”—an assertion she can
make because she no longer buys into the myth of him.

Death and Family Trauma

The speaker, traumatized by the death of her father at an early age, develops an obsession with
mortality. She dreams of bringing her father back to life, and when her prayers don’t work, she
even tries to join him in death. When even her attempt at suicide fails, she chooses to bring her
father back to life metaphorically in the form of a husband who resembles him. While, on the
one hand, the poem can be read as a broad call to puncture authoritarian myths and free
oneself from patriarchal oppression, on a more personal level it simply speaks to the pain and
confusion surrounding the death of a parent and the tendency to recreate toxic childhood
dynamics in adult relationships.

The speaker's father dies when she is just ten years old (in real life, Plath's father actually died
when she was eight), and the trauma of this event has lingered ever since. The poem is filled
with images of death and decay, as can be seen when the speaker deems her father a “Ghastly
statue with one grey toe / Big as a Frisco seal.” This is an allusion to Plath's actual father, who
developed gangrene of the foot and eventually died of complications from diabetes. Clearly, it is
the image of her father's dying that stays with the speaker, and it is on death that she begins to
fixate.

The speaker "pray[s]" to bring her father back, and when that fails she attempts suicide: “At
twenty I tried to die / And get back, back, back to you.” She survives the attempt, metaphorically
"pulled out of the sack" and pushed back into her life. Yet she is never the same; she has been
"stuck ... together with glue," implying a newfound sense of fragility and brokenness upon
having failed to reunite with her father.

The speaker then decides rather than trying to reach her father through death, she will bring him
back to life in the form of a husband. The speaker thus makes “a model” of her father and
marries him. This husband, however, turns out to be just as unhealthy for her as her fixation on
the memory of her father’s death. She claims that her husband is a vampire who drank her
blood—her life force—for seven years. This image attests to the unhealthiness of the marriage,
which drains the speaker of life in much the same way her father’s memory does.

It is clear that, in order to rid herself of the traumatic hold her father’s death has on her, the
speaker must entirely close the door on this chapter of her life. She does this through ending
her marriage to her husband, an act she likens to killing a man. The speaker claims, “If I’ve
killed one man, I’ve killed two—”, referring to the power both her husband and her father’s
memory had over her.

By metaphorically bringing her father back to life through marriage, the speaker is able to
exercise control over a set of events that initially left her feeling scared and helpless. Her
marriage acts as a re-enactment of her relationship with her father, except this time she is an
adult and is given the time she needs to see the relationship clearly. When the speaker chooses
to end her marriage, she does so knowing that it will destroy her father’s memory as well, an act
that allows her to finally break free of her trauma.

Sylvia Plath’s poem "Daddy" had very dark tones and imagery including death and suicide, in
addition to the Holocaust. Plath wrote about her father's death that occurred when she was eight
years old and of her ongoing battle trying to free herself from her father. Plath’s father, Otto
Plath, had died from complications after his leg amputation. He had been ill previously before
his death for around four years before finally dying from untreated diabetes mellitus. Initially in
"Daddy," Plath idolizes her father, going as far as to compare him to God. However, as her
poem progresses, she later compares him to a swastika and what it symbolizes.
Plath alludes to her father being a Nazi soldier and in contrast, compares herself to a Jewish
prisoner. In fact, he was described by Plath as a diabolical being, causing her constant fear. The
metaphor Plath employed is a means of expressing her relationship with her father. Plath
ultimately had feared her father and was terrified of him as those who were Jewish were terrified
of the Nazi soldiers. She includes various references to the masses brutally murdered by the
Holocaust and the destruction of war in her poem. She ends the poem by alluding to her
marriage as a continuation of her trauma bond with her father and calling her father a vampire
who had finally been stabbed with a stake in his heart.

Interpretation
Some critics have interpreted "Daddy" in both biographical and psychoanalytic terms. For
instance, critic Robert Phillips wrote, "Finally the one way [Plath] was to achieve relief, to
become an independent Self, was to kill her father's memory, which, in 'Daddy,' she does by a
metaphorical murder. Making him a Nazi and herself a Jew, she dramatizes the war in her soul. .
. From its opening image onward, that of the father as an "old shoe" in which the daughter has
lived for thirty years—an explicitly phallic image, according to the writings of Freud—the sexual
pull and tug is manifest, as is the degree of Plath's mental suffering, supported by references to
Dachau, Auschwitz, and Belsen."

Critics writers Guinevara A. Nance and Judith P. Jones take the same approach of
psychoanalyzing Plath via "Daddy." They essentially make the same argument as Phillips as
they also write that "[Plath] accentuates linguistically the speaker's reliving of her childhood.
Using the heavy cadences of nursery rhyme and baby words such as 'chuffing,' 'achoo,' and
'gobbledygoo,' she employs a technical device similar to Joyce's in A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man, where the child's simple perspective is reflected through language."
The lecturer of English Literature at the University of Amsterdam and author Rudolph Glitz
argues the poem could be interpreted additionally as a break-up letter. In some verses of the
poem, Glitz mentions "Daddy" addresses another person aside from Plath and her father. The
line, “the vampire who said he was you” Glitz argues is referencing Plath’s estranged husband,
Ted Hughes. Further suggested by the line in which Plath wrote “I do, I do” in and the “seven
years” the vampire had drunk Plath’s blood. Plath was married to Ted Hughes for seven years.
In the very last lines of the poem, the vampire figure merges with Plath’s father, “Daddy.” Plath
also writes before this merge, the "black phone" has been disconnected so that the “voices”
could not “worm through,” which Glitz also connects to Plath's discovery of Hughes's affair when
Plath answered a telephone call from Hughes's lover.

Lisa Narbeshuber’s essay,“The Poetics of Torture: The Spectacle of Sylvia Plath's Poetry"
displayed how several of Plath's most famous poems, including "Daddy," portrayed the female
figure in opposition to male authority. Narbeshuber argued the objectified female form had been
previously displayed was now confronting and renouncing the oppressive and social as well as
cultural norms that dehumanized women. Narbeshuber went on to credit Plath for tackling
issues of female identity that once silenced women. “Daddy,” she argued, showed the female
transformation of the 1950s into a “transgressive dialect." The bringing of one’s private self into
the public realm. The rebellious speaker in “Daddy” made the invisible visible and the private
public. Plath dramatized her imprisonment and fantasized about defeating her tormentors
through the means of killing them. Plath identified with the persecuted Jews, the marginalized
and the hidden, as her body had been stolen from her and divided into articles belonging to the
Nazis to do as they wished with them. With that said, Narbeshuber argued Plath had been trying
to assume herself and not succumb to the stress that was imposed on the female body.

Critic George Steiner referred to "Daddy" as "the Guernica of modern poetry", arguing that it
"achieves the classic art of generalization, translating a private, obviously intolerable hurt into a
code of plain statement, of instantaneously public images which concern us all".
Adam Kirsch has written that some of Plath's works, like "Daddy", are self-mythologizing and
suggests that readers should not interpret the poem as a strictly "confessional",
autobiographical poem about her actual father . Sylvia Plath herself also did not describe the
poem in autobiographical terms.
When she introduced the poem for a BBC radio reading shortly before her suicide, she
described the piece in the third person, stating that the poem was about "a girl with an Electra
complex [whose] father died while she thought he was God. Her case is complicated by the fact
that her father was also a Nazi and her mother very possibly part Jewish. In the daughter the
two strains marry and paralyze each other – she has to act out the awful little allegory once over
before she is free of it."
Jacqueline Shea Murphy wrote the essay, “‘This Holocaust I Walk In’: Consuming Violence in
Sylvia Plath’s Poetry” where she stated that “Daddy” was an example of the fall of violent
authoritative control over Plath’s body. Murphy further defined that the particular fall was not just
in reference to Plath’s body but the fall of the violent control of numerous bodies throughout
history.
The violent control of various bodies as dramatized in "Daddy" portrayed the transformation of
said bodies as representatives of oppression. The speaker of "Daddy," moved from the position
of the oppressed to the position of the oppressor. The oppressed in "Daddy" being the Jewish
people due to their torment in the death camps. The oppressor was one capable of killing as
well as committing the torment. “Daddy, I have had to kill you,” said the speaker who “maybe a
bit of a Jew” and whose Daddy was a Nazi.
Murphy emphasized that Plath spoke of the division between either being oppressed or
oppressing, being controlled or control, and being mutilated or mutilate. Murphy argued Plath
was referring to the survival of the fittest while simultaneously exposing the party in power.
Murphy also claimed that Plath had been protesting the patriarchy’s ways of obtaining power
and authority.
The power struggles throughout "Daddy" appeared to be explicitly gendered as the speaker is
generally female and spoke out to expose and get back at men. The mentioned metaphors of
oppression were used to describe the power struggles prevalent throughout "Daddy." Murphy
explained that the power structure would remain intact, yet Plath imagined herself being the one
in control and tormenting her tormentors.
According to Murphy, Plath emphasized the power of the oppressed, the mutilated body, as she
recognized the oppressor was entirely dependent on the oppressed. The mutilated, oppressed
bodies were as important and as a result become the authoritative figure to be read.

Plath makes use of a number of poetic techniques in ‘Daddy’ these include enjambment,
metaphor, simile, and juxtaposition. The former, juxtaposition, is used when two contrasting
objects or ideas are placed in conversation with one another in order to emphasize that
contrast. A poet usually does this in order to speak on a larger theme of their text or make an
important point about the differences between these two things. in this poem, there is a
consistent juxtaposition between innocence or youthful emotions, and pain.

Metaphors and similes appear throughout the text in order to convey the speaker’s emotional
opinions about her father. He is compared to a Nazi, a sadist, and a vampire, as well as a few
other people and objects.

Another important technique that is commonly used in poetry is enjambment. This occurs when
a line is cut off before its natural stopping point. It forces a reader down to the next line, and the
next, quickly. One has to move forward in order to comfortably resolve a phrase or sentence.
There are instances in almost every stanza, but a reader can look to the beginning of stanzas
three and four for poignant examples of this technique.

Stanza One
You do not do, you do not do

(…)

Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

In this first stanza of ‘Daddy’, the speaker reveals that the subject of whom she speaks is no
longer there. This is why she says and repeats, “You do not do”. The following line is rather
surprising, as it does not express loss or sadness. On the contrary, it begins to reveal the nature
of this particular father-daughter relationship. The speaker compares her father to a “black
shoe”. It seems like a strange comparison until the third line reveals that the speaker herself has
felt “like a foot” that has been forced to live thirty years in that shoe. The foot is “poor and white”
because, for thirty years, it has been suffocated by the shoe and never allowed to see the light
of day.

The last line in this stanza reveals that the speaker felt not only suffocated by her father, but
fearful of him as well. In fact, she expresses that her fear of him was so intense, that she was
afraid to even breathe or sneeze.

Stanza Two
Daddy, I have had to kill you.

(…)

Big as a Frisco seal

In the second stanza of ‘Daddy’, the speaker reveals her own personal desire to kill her father.
The first line states, “I have had to kill you”. The next line goes on to explain that the speaker
actually did not have time to kill her father, because he died before she could manage to do it.
She does not make this confession regretfully or sorrowfully. Rather, she calls him “a bag full of
God” which suggests that her view of her father as well as her view of God was one of fear and
trepidation. She describes him as a “ghastly statue with one gray toe big as a Frisco seal”.

Her description of her father as a statue suggests that she saw no capacity for feeling in him. A
“Frisco seal” refers to one of the sea lions that can be seen in San Francisco. When she
describes that one of his toes is as big as a seal, it reveals to the reader just how enormous and
overbearing her father seemed to her. He was hardened, without feelings, and now that he is
dead, she thinks he looks like an enormous, ominous statue.

Stanza Three
And a head in the freakish Atlantic

(…)

Ach, du.

Here, looking at her dead father, the speaker describes the gorgeous scenery of the Atlantic
Ocean and the beautiful area of “Nauset”. However, she also uses the word “freakish” to
precede her descriptions of the beautiful Atlantic Ocean. This reveals that even though her
father may have been a beautiful specimen of a human being, she knew personally that there
was something awful about him. In the final two lines of this stanza, the speaker reveals that at
one point during her father’s sickness, she even prayed that he would recover. The last line of
this stanza is the German phrase for “oh, you.”

Stanza Four
In the German tongue, in the Polish town

(…)

My Polack friend

In stanza four of ‘Daddy’, the speaker begins to wonder about her father and his origins. The
speaker knows that he came from a Polish town, where German was the main language
spoken. She explains that the town he grew up in had endured one war after another. She
would never be able to identify which specific town he was from because the name of his
hometown was a common name. This stanza ends mid-sentence. The speaker begins to
explain that she learned something from her “Polack friend”.

Stanza Five
Says there are a dozen or two.

(…)

The tongue stuck in my jaw.

Here, the speaker finishes what she began to explain in the previous stanza by explaining that
she learned from a friend that the name of the Polish town her father came from, was a very
common name. For this reason, she concludes that she “could never tell where [he] put [his]
foot”. It’s clear she will not ever be able to know exactly where his roots are from. She had never
asked him because she “could never talk to [him]”.

After this, the speaker then explains that she was afraid to talk to him. She states, “The tongue
stuck in my jaw” when explaining the way she felt when she wanted to talk to her father.

Stanza Six
It stuck in a barb wire snare.

(…)
And the language obscene

In this stanza, she continues to describe the way she felt around her father. She felt as though
her tongue were stuck in barbed wire. “Ich” is the German word for “I”. This reveals that
whenever she wanted to speak to her father, she could only stutter and say, “I, I, I.”. She then
describes that she thought every German man was her father. This reveals that she does not
distinguish him as someone familiar and close to her. Rather, she sees him as she sees any
other German man, harsh and obscene.

Stanza Seven
An engine, an engine

(…)

I think I may well be a Jew.

In stanza seven of ‘Daddy’, the speaker begins to reveal to the readers that she felt like a Jew
under the reign of her German father. This is a very strong comparison, and the speaker knows
this and yet does not hesitate to use this simile. The oppression which she has suffered under
the reign of her father is painful and unbearable, something she feels compares to the
oppression of the Jews under the Germans in the Holocaust. For this reason, she specifically
mentions Auschwitz, among other concentration camps.

She then concludes that she began to talk like a Jew, like one who was oppressed and silenced
by German oppressors. Then she concludes that because she feels the oppression that the
Jews feel, she identifies with the Jews and therefore considers herself a Jew.

Stanza Eight
The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna

(…)

I may be a bit of a Jew.

In this stanza, the speaker continues to criticize the Germans as she compares the “snows of
Tyrol” and the “clear beer of Vienna” to the German’s idea of racial purity. She concludes that
they “are not very pure or true”. Then, the speaker considers her ancestry, and the gypsies that
were part of her heritage. Gypsies, like Jews, were singled out for execution by the Nazis, and
so the speaker identifies not only with Jews but also with gypsies. In fact, she seems to identify
with anyone who has ever felt oppressed by the Germans. In the last line of this stanza, the
speaker suggests that she is probably part Jewish, and part Gypsy.
Stanza Nine
I have always been scared of you,

(…)

Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You——

Here, the speaker finally finds the courage to address her father, now that he is dead. She
admits that she has always been afraid of him. She implies that her father had something to do
with the airforce, as that is how the word “Luftwaffe” translates to English. “Gobbledygook”
however, is simply gibberish. This implies that the speaker feels that her father and his language
made no sense to her. In this instance, she felt afraid of him and feared everything about him.

She never was able to understand him, and he was always someone to fear. She was afraid of
his “neat mustache” and his “Aryan eye, bright blue”. This description of his eyes implies that he
was one of those Germans whom the Nazis believed to be a superior race. He was Aryan, with
blue eyes. He was something fierce and terrifying to the speaker, and she associates him
closely with the Nazis. A “panzer-mam” was a German tank driver, and so this continues the
comparison between her father and a Nazi.

Stanza Ten
Not God but a swastika

(…)

Brute heart of a brute like you.

In this stanza, the speaker compares her father to God. She clearly sees God as an ominous
overbearing being who clouds her world. This is why she describes her father as a giant black
swastika that covered the entire sky. The third line of this stanza begins a sarcastic description
of women and men like her father. She mockingly says, “every woman adores a Fascist” and
then begins to describe the violence of men like her father. She calls uses the word “brute” three
times in the last two lines of this stanza. If these lines were not written in jest, then she clearly
believes that women, for some reason or another, tend to fall in love with violent brutes.

Stanza Eleven
You stand at the blackboard, daddy,

(…)

Any less the black man who

In the first line of this stanza, the speaker describes her father as a teacher standing at the
blackboard. The author’s father, was, in fact, a professor. This is how the speaker views her
father. She can see the cleft in his chin as she imagines him standing there at the blackboard.
Then she describes that the cleft that is in his chin, should really be in his foot. This simply
means that she views her father as the devil himself.

The devil is often characterized as an animal with cleft feet, and the speaker believes he wears
his cleft on his chin rather than on his feet. Her description of her father as a “black man” does
not refer to his skin color but rather to the darkness of his soul. This stanza ends with the word
“who” because the author breaks the stanza mid-sentence.

Stanza Twelve
Bit my pretty red heart in two.

(…)

I thought even the bones would do.

With the first line of this stanza, the speaker finishes her sentence and reveals that her father
has broken her heart. She says that he has “bit [her] pretty red heart in two”. The rest of this
stanza reveals a deeper understanding of the speaker’s relationship with her father. Even
though he was a cruel, overbearing brute, at one point in her life, she loved him dearly. It is
possible that as a child, she was able to love him despite his cruelty. As an adult, however, she
cannot see past his vices.

This stanza reveals that the speaker was only ten years old when her father died, and that she
mourned for him until she was twenty. She even tried to end her life in order to see him again.
She thought that even if she was never to see him again in an after-life, to simply have her
bones buried by his bones would be enough of a comfort to her.

Stanza Thirteen
But they pulled me out of the sack,

(…)

A man in black with a Meinkampf look

In this stanza, the speaker reveals that she was not able to commit suicide, even though she
tried. She reveals that she was found and “pulled…out of the sack” and stuck back together
“with glue”. At this point, the speaker experienced a revelation. She realized that she must
re-create her father. She decided to find and love a man who reminded her of her father. Freud’s
theory on the Oedipus complex seems to come into play here. The theory that girls fall in love
with their fathers as children, and boys with their mothers, also suggests that these boys and
girls grow up to find husbands and wives that resemble their fathers and mother.

The speaker has already suggested that women love a brutal man, and perhaps she is now
confessing that she was once such a woman. This is why the speaker says that she finds a
“model” of her father who is “a man in black with a Meinkampf look”. While “Meinkampf” means
“my struggle”, the last line of this stanza most likely means that the man she found to marry
looked like her father and like Hitler.

Stanza Fourteen
And a love of the rack and the screw.

(…)

The voices just can’t worm through.

In this stanza, the speaker reveals that the man she married enjoyed to torture. This is why she
describes him as having “a love of the rack and the screw”. She confesses that she married him
when she says, “And I said I do, I do.” Then she tells her father that she is through. This means
that having re-created her father by marrying a harsh German man, she no longer needed to
mourn her father’s death. She then describes her relationship with her father as a phone call.
Now she has hung up, and the call is forever ended.

Stanza Fifteen
If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two——
(…)
Daddy, you can lie back now.
In this stanza of ‘Daddy’, the speaker reminds the readers that she has already claimed to have
killed her father. She revealed that he actually died before she could get to him, but she still
claims the responsibility for his death. Now she says that if she has killed one man, she’s killed
two. This is most likely in reference to her husband. She refers to her husband as a vampire,
one who was supposed to be just like her father. As it turned out, he was not just like her father.
In fact, he drained the life from her. This is why she refers to him as a vampire who drank her
blood.

It is not clear why she first says that he drank her blood for “a year”. However, the speaker then
changes her mind and says, “seven years, if you want to know.” When the speaker says,
“daddy, you can lie back now” she is telling him that the part of him that has lived on within her
can die now, too.

Stanza Sixteen
There’s a stake in your fat black heart
(…)

Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

In this stanza, the speaker reveals that her father, though dead, has somehow lived on, like a
vampire, to torture her. It is claimed that she must kill her father the way that a vampire must be
killed, with a stake to the heart. She then goes on to explain to her father that “the villagers
never liked you”. She explains that they dance and stomp on his grave. The speaker says that
the villagers “always knew it was [him]”. This suggests that the people around them always
suspected that there was something different and mysterious about her father.

With the final line, the speaker tells her father that she is through with him. While he has been
dead for years, it is clear that her memory of him has caused her great grief and struggle. The
speaker was unable to move on without acknowledging that her father was, in fact, a brute.
Once she was able to come to terms with what he truly was, she was able to let him stop
torturing her from the grave.

Symbolism in 'Daddy' poem

That father-figure in 'Daddy' seems like the ultimate villain. He's depicted as Nazi-like, indifferent
to his daughter's suffering, a brutish fascist, and a vampire who needs to be put down. But as
bad as the speaker's father sounds, most of that is symbolic. He wasn't literally a vampire or a
morally "black" man who "bit his daughter's heart in two" (55-56).

Instead, the speaker uses all of this brutal, haunting imagery to symbolize how awful her father
was. But the way the father is constantly changing from one shape to another tells readers that
"daddy" represents more than just the speaker's papa. In fact, the way "daddy" morphs to
encompass both the father and the speaker's vampiric husband towards the end of the poem
shows that "daddy" is actually a symbol for all men who want to control and oppress the
speaker.

The speaker says, "Every woman adores a Fascist" (48) and "If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed
two" (71), essentially lumping all domineering, oppressive men into the figure of "daddy." While
most of the poem seems to be very specific to one man, the speaker's use of collective nouns
like "Luftwaffe," "they," and "every German" showcases that this is more than just a vendetta
against one man. "Daddy" definitely symbolizes a bad father, but he also symbolizes the
speaker's complicated relationship with all the men in her life who tell her what to do and make
her feel small.

Metaphor
The speaker uses a LOT of metaphors to build the image of her father. First, she calls him
"black shoe / In which I have lived like a foot / For thirty years" (2-4). This calls to mind a silly
nursery rhyme, but it also depicts how the speaker feels trapped by his overbearing presence.
The darkness of the metaphor deepens when she says he's dead, but he's "Marble-heavy, a
bag full of God, / Ghastly statue with one gray toe" (8-9). But her father as a statue is huge and
covers the entirety of the United States.

Even though the father is dead, his influence still makes the daughter feel trapped, and his
image still looms larger than life over her. How impactful does a person have to be that after 20
years their grown daughter still feels scared, trapped, and intimidated by a dead man's
memory?

In lines 29-35, the speaker uses the image of a train taking Jewish Holocaust victims to
concentration camps to compare her relationship with her father. She says, "I think I may well be
a Jew" (35) and she knows she is on her way to a concentration camp. While she is a Jew,
"daddy" is the Luftwaffe and she tells her father: "I have always been scared of you,... / your
neat mustache / And your Aryan eye, bright blue. / panzer-man, panzer-man, O You—" (42-45).

In this historically haunting metaphor, the speaker is saying that her father wants her dead. He
is the perfect German man, and she is a Jew who will never be seen as his equal. She is a
victim of her father's cruelty. In lines 46-47 the speaker switches quickly between a metaphor of
her father as God to one of him as a swastika, the symbol of the Nazis: "Not God but a swastika
/ So black no sky could squeak through." Her father has shifted from this all-powerful, divine
figure to a symbol of evil, greed, and hatred.

Plath has come under a lot of criticism for using something as horrific as the Holocaust to
compare to her personal struggles.

A new metaphor takes prominence in the last few stanzas of the poem. This time, the speaker is
comparing her husband and her father to a vampire: "The vampire who said he was you / And
drank my blood for a year, / Seven years, if you want to know" (72-74). This shows that the
influence her father has had in her life merely shifted, perpetuating the cycle of toxic,
manipulative men.

In the last stanza, the speaker regains control of the metaphor: "There’s a stake in your fat black
heart / And the villagers never liked you. / They are dancing and stamping on you" (76-78). This
shows that the speaker finally killed the influence of her father and husband. She feels
empowered in this decision by "the villagers" who could be her friends, or maybe they're just her
emotions that tell her she did the right thing. Either way, the dominating metaphors of the male
figures are murdered, leaving the speaker to be free to live without carrying their weight any
longer.

Imagery
The imagery in this poem contributes to the dark, angry tone of the poem and allows the
metaphors mentioned above to expand over multiple lines and stanzas. For example, the
speaker never explicitly says that her father is a Nazi, but she uses plenty of imagery to liken
him to both Hitler and Hitler's idea of the perfect German: "And your neat mustache / And your
Aryan eye, bright blue" (43-44).
The speaker also uses imagery to depict how her father's influence looms larger than life. In
lines 9-14 she says, "Ghastly statue with one gray 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." The imagery here depicts how her father stretches across the
entirety of the United States, and the speaker is unable to escape him.

This section contains some of the only lines that have beautiful, light imagery with the blue
waters. They stand in stark juxtaposition to the next few stanzas where Jewish people are
tortured in the Holocaust.

Onomatopoeia
The speaker uses onomatopoeia to mimic a nursery rhyme, depicting how young she was when
her father first scarred her. She uses words like "Achoo" sparingly throughout the poem but to
great effect. The onomatopoeia tunes readers into the mind of a child, making what her father
does to her even worse. It also paints the speaker as an innocent throughout the poem: even
when she's at her most violent the reader is reminded of her childhood wounds and can
sympathize with her plight.

The onomatopoeia in "Ich, ich, ich, ich," the repetition of the German word for "I" (her father's
main language) demonstrates how the speaker stumbles over herself when it comes to her
father and was unable to communicate with him.

Allusion and Simile

The poem uses many allusions to World War II to position the speaker as a victim against her
father, who is depicted as a dangerous, merciless, brutish man. She uses similes to directly
compare herself to a Jew in WWII, while comparing her father to a Nazi. For example, the
speaker compares herself to a Jew, being taken away to "Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen" (33),
concentration camps where Jews were worked to death, starved, and murdered. She uses a
simile to make the connection more prominent, saying "I began to talk like a Jew. / I think I may
well be a Jew" (34-35).

Her father, on the other hand, is a Nazi: he is cruel and will never see her as an equal. But the
speaker never directly says the word Nazi; instead she alludes to it, saying "your Luftwaffe, your
gobbledygoo. / And your neat mustache / And your Aryan eye, bright blue. / Panzer-man,
panzer-man O You—— / ...a swastika... / Every woman adores a Fascist" (42-48). The Luftwaffe
was the German air force during WWII, the mustache is a reference to Adolf Hitler's famous
mustache, the Aryan eyes refer to Hitler's "perfect race," the panzer was a Nazi tank, the
swastika was the Nazi symbol, and fascism was Nazism's political ideology.

Later, the speaker again uses an allusion to Nazi ideology when she says her husband is a
model of her father, "A man in black with a Meinkampf look" (65). Mein Kampf was the
autobiographical manifesto written by Nazi-leader Adolf Hitler that detailed his political ideology
and became the bible of Nazism with the Third Reich. The speaker is anticipating that readers
will know Mein Kampf so they will understand the fascist, radical nature of her husband.
Positioning herself as an innocent, defenseless Jewish woman helps readers sympathize with
her over her Nazi-esque father and husband.

Though not an allusion to WWII, the speaker uses simile once more towards the beginning of
the poem to showcase how much of her life her father has taken up. She says his toe alone is
"Big as a Frisco seal," (10) a reference to San Francisco, while his head is "in the freakish
Atlantic" (11) on the other side of the country.

Hyperbole
The speaker uses hyperbole to show how small and insignificant she feels in relation to her
father who has taken up her entire life. This is first implied when she calls her father a shoe and
herself the foot that is stuck inside it. If he's big enough to completely overshadow her, and she's
small enough to be tucked away inside him, there is a significant size difference between the
two.

We see just how big the father is when she compares him to a statue that has overtaken all of
the United States. She says, "Ghastly statue with one gray 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" (9-13). He doesn't just follow her around like some incessant fly, instead he has claimed
the entire country.

To the speaker, the father is larger than life. He is also evil. She later compares him to a
swastika, now a sign associated with the atrocities committed by the German Nazi party, saying
"Not God but a swastika / So black no sky could squeak through" (46). If the sky is hope or light,
then his influence is enough to completely blot any of those good feelings out. "Daddy" is larger
than life and all-encompassing.

Apostrophe
Apostrophe is used in lines 6, 51, 68, 75, 80, every time the speaker directly talks to daddy.
Daddy is used throughout to show how big of a force the father figure is in the poem. The reader
knows that he's dead, but the fact that the speaker is still thinking about him enough to fill up 80
lines of poetry means he has had an incredible impact on the speaker's thoughts.

Although the entire poem is dedicated to "daddy," before the last line, the speaker only says
"daddy" four times throughout the first 79 lines in the poem. But in line 80, she uses "daddy"
twice in quick succession: "Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through." This heightens the
emotions that she feels towards her father and also ends the poem on one final note. This time
he isn't just referred to as the affectionate, more child-like title "daddy," he's also "you bastard",
showcasing that the speaker has finally cut off any positive feelings towards her father and has
managed to finally bury him in the past and move on, no longer in his shadow.

One of the main criteria for a literary apostrophe is that the implied audience isn't present when
the speaker is addressing them, they're either absent or dead.
Consonance, Assonance, Alliteration, and Juxtaposition
Consonance, assonance, and alliteration help to control the rhythm of the poem since there is
no set meter or rhyme scheme. They contribute to the sing-song effect that gives the poem the
eerie feeling of a nursery rhyme gone bad, and they help to heighten the emotion in the poem.
For example, consonance occurs with the repetition of the "K: sound in lines “I began to talk like
a Jew” (34) and the "R" sound in “Are not very pure or true” (37). The repetition of these sounds
make the poem more melodic.

Assonance makes the poem more sing-song too since it contributes to near rhymes inside the
lines. The "A" sound in “They are dancing and stamping on you” and the sound of "E" in “I was
ten when they buried you” creates a juxtaposition between the playful near rhymes and the dark
subject matter of the poem. The juxtaposition starts in the first line with the allusion to the "Little
Old Lady Who Lived in the Shoe" and the angry tone of the poem and continues throughout.

The repetition of the m sound in “I made a model of you,” (64) and the h sound in “Daddy, I have
had to kill you” (6) create a hard and fast rhythm that propels the reader forward. There is no
natural meter to the poem, so the speaker relies on the repetition of consonants and vowels to
control the pace. Again the playful repetition in alliteration is gutted by the dark meaning behind
the speaker's words.

Enjambment and Endstop

Out of 80 lines in the poem, 37 of them are end stops. Enjambment, starting from the very first
line, creates a quick pace in the poem. The speaker says,

"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," (1-4).

Enjambment also allows the speaker's thoughts to flow freely, creating a stream of
consciousness effect. This might make her seem like a slightly less reliable narrator because
she just says whatever comes to mind, but it also positions her as personable and emotionally
open. Readers are drawn to trust her because the stream of consciousness, created by
enjambment, is more intimate. This helps to position her as a victim who deserves empathy as
opposed to her father who is emotionally reserved and difficult to like.

Repetition
The speaker uses several cases of repetition to 1) create the nursery rhyme feel that pervades
the poem, 2) showcase her compulsive, childlike relationship with her father, and 3) show how
her father's memory is a constant presence in her life even though he's dead. She starts off the
poem with repetition: "You do not do, you do not do / Any more, black shoe" (1-2) and carries on
that repetition in various stanzas throughout the poem. She also repeats the idea that "I think I
may well be a Jew" in multiple lines (32, 34, 35, and 40), showcasing how she has been her
father's victim throughout time.

The repetition of the word "back" in, "And get back, back, back to you" (59) demonstrates how
she's stuck in the past, equal parts wanting her father and hating him. Finally, the idea that the
speaker is through with her father's dominating influence is echoed towards the middle and the
end of the poem, coming to a crescendo with the last like, "Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m
through" (80).

Plath's Electra Complex

In psychoanalysis, an Electra complex is the female version of Freud's Oedipus complex. Jung
posited that a daughter perceives her mother as a rival for the psychosexual energy of her
father, and wants to possess the father. This unresolved desire sometimes manifests as
negative fixation on the father or father figure.

What did Plath mean that "Daddy" was 'spoken by a girl with an Electra complex'?
In "Daddy," the speaker is father-fixated. She's a "daddy's girl" and uses the childlike, endearing
term "daddy" seven times to describe the man whose memory tortures her. During the course of
the poem, the speaker's goal shifts from an attempt to recover, reunite with, and marry her dead
father to an attempt to kill his memory and terminate his dominance over her.

"Daddy" and the Holocaust

As the poem progresses, the narrator identifies herself with the plight of the Jews during the
Nazi regime in Germany. There are many direct references to the holocaust in the poem.

Why does the poet use such a metaphor? Does it takes things one step too far? Is it acceptable
to use such an event to drive home a personal message of pain and torment? Is it okay to
appropriate someone else's pain?

Using the nightmarish scenario of the holocaust as a metaphor for the daughter's relationship
with her German father does tap into historical depth and meaning. The poem is ironically
depersonalized and taken beyond mere confession into archetypal father-daughter pathos.

Sylvia Plath has risked all by introducing the holocaust into the poem; only her astute use of
rhythm, rhyme and lyric allows her to get away with it.

The Trial of Eichmann

Sylvia Plath undoubtedly knew about the Final Solution of the Nazis in World War II. The trial of
Adolf Eichmann lasted from April 11, 1961 to December 15, 1961 and was shown on television,
allowing the whole world to witness the horrors of the holocaust. (Plath wrote "Daddy" the
following year.) As a leading instigator of death in the concentration camp gas chambers, the SS
Lieutenant-Colonel became notorious as the 'desk-murderer'. He was found guilty by trial in
Jerusalem, Israel, and sentenced to hang.
Language
This poem is full of surreal imagery and allusion interspersed with scenes from the poet's
childhood and a kind of dark cinematic language that borrows from nursery rhyme and song
lyric. Every so often German is used, reflecting the fact that Plath's father, Otto, was from
Germany and must have spoken in this language to Sylvia in her childhood.

Is "Daddy" Based on Real Events in Plath's Life?

There's little doubt that Sylvia Plath was trying to exorcise the spirits of both her father and her
ex husband Ted Hughes in this poem. At first, her marriage had been euphoric, but after the
birth of her two children, life became much harder. News that Hughes was having an affair with
Assia Wevill, a dark-haired woman they met in London, and of Wevill's pregnancy by Hughes
could have been the tipping point for the sensitive and manic poet. She took her own life on
February 11th, 1963, a little more than a year after writing "Daddy."

Is "Daddy" confessional poetry?

Although we can't say that the speaker is Plath herself, "Daddy" is a quintessential example of
confessional poetry, which is very emotional and autobiographical in nature. This confessional,
subjective style of writing became popular in the late 50s to early 60s.

The Courage to Express Such Pain

"Daddy" is a poem Plath had to write. It's successful because you catch glimpses of her real life
bubbling up through metaphor and allegory, but she never makes it fully confessional. That's
why I don't agree with those critics who say this poem is nothing but a selfish, immature
outburst, a revenge poem. It most certainly isn't. You have to have courage to express such pain
in this manner and you could say that courage is a sign of great maturity.

When read through as a whole, "Daddy" stops and starts, splutters and shunts, travels over
rough ground, and screeches round corners. At one time you're above the whole of the USA,
the next in some sort of nightmare tunnel or cinema where they're showing a life story of your
own bete noire.

So, "Daddy" is both simple and complicated, a bloody nursery rhyme from voodoo land, a dark,
lyrical train of thought exploring what is still a taboo subject.

Conclusion
Sylvia Plath (biography) begins ‘Daddy’ with her present understanding of her father and the
kind of man that he was. She then offers readers some background explanation of her
relationship with her father. As ‘Daddy’ progresses, the readers begins to realize that the
speaker has not always hated her father. She has not always seen him as a brute, although she
makes it clear that he always has been oppressive. As a child, the speaker did not know
anything apart from her father’s mentality, and so she prays for his recovery and then mourns
his death. She even wishes to join him in death.