‘Daddy’ by Sylvia Plath

‘Daddy’ by Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath's poem "Daddy" remains one of the most controversial modern poems ever written. It is a dark, surreal, and at times painful allegory that uses metaphor and other devices to carry the idea of a female victim finally freeing herself from her father. In Plath's own words:

"Here is a poem spoken by a girl with an Electra complex. Her 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 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."

"Daddy" was written on October 12th 1962, a month after Plath had separated from her husband and moved—with their two small children—from their home in Devon to a flat in London. Four months later Plath was dead, but she wrote some of her best poems during that turbulent period. In this article you'll find

Analysis of ‘Daddy’:

"Daddy" is an attempt to combine the personal with the mythical. It's unsettling, a weird nursery rhyme of the divided self, a controlled blast aimed at a father and a husband (since the two conflate in the 14th stanza). The poem expresses Plath's terror and pain lyrically and hauntingly. It combines light echoes of a Mother Goose nursery rhyme with much darker resonances of World War II.

The father is seen as a black shoe, a bag full of God, a cold marble statue, a Nazi, a swastika, a fascist, a sadistic brute, and a vampire. The girl (narrator, speaker) is trapped in her idolization of this man. She is a victim trapped in that black tomblike shoe, in the sack that holds the father's bones, and—in a sense—in the train as it chugs along to Auschwitz. "Daddy" is full of disturbing imagery, and that's why some have called "Daddy" "the Guernica of modern poetry."

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.

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.

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.

Which Poetic Devices Are Used in "Daddy"?

·        It has 16 stanzas, each with five lines, making a total of 80 lines.

·        The meter is roughly tetrameter, four beats, but also uses pentameter with a mix of stresses.

·        Thirty-seven lines are end-stopped and enjambment is frequently used.

·        Metaphor and simile are present, as are half-rhymes, alliteration, and assonance. The father is compared to a black shoe, a bag full of God, a giant, cold, marble statue, a Nazi, a swastika, a fascist, a sadist, and a vampire.

·        The speaker uses baby talk to describe truly dark and painful feelings. She calls him "daddy," she calls a sneeze "achoo," "gobbledygoo," she gets tongue-tied and stammery ("Ich, ich, ich, ich"), and uses singsong repetitions. The juxtaposition of innocence and pain emphasizes both.

·        There's also the howling, mournful "choo choo" sound of a steam train throughout: "You do not do, you do not do," "achoo," black shoe, glue, you, do, du, "I do, I do," shoe, two, screw, through, gobbledygoo, Jew, blue.... This repeated "ooo-ooo" sound gives the poem momentum, energy, and conjures up the image of a train chuffing its way to the final destination (which, in this case, is a Nazi death camp).

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.

Stanza-by-Stanza Analysis of Plath's "Daddy"

Stanza 1: A first line repeated, a declaration of intent, the first sounds of oo—this is the train setting off on its final death march. The black shoe is a metaphor for the father. Inside, trapped for 30 years, is the narrator, about to escape.

Stanza 2: But she can only free herself by killing her "daddy," who does resemble the poet's actual father, Otto, who died when she was 8. His toe turned black from gangrene. He eventually had to have his leg amputated due to complications of diabetes. When young Plath heard this news, she said, "I'll never speak to God again." Here, the bizarre, surreal imagery builds up—his toe is as big as a seal, the grotesque image of her father has fallen like a statue.

Stanza 3: The personal weaves in and out of the allegory. The statue's head is in the Atlantic, on the coast at Nauset Beach, Cape Cod, where the Plath family used to holiday. The father icon stretches all the way across the USA. The imagery is temporarily beautiful: bean green over blue water. The speaker says she used to pray to get her father back, restored to health.

Stanza 4: We move on to Poland and the second world war. There's a mix of the factual and fictional. Otto Plath was born in Grabow, Poland, a common name, but spoke German in a typical autocratic fashion. This town has been razed in many wars adding strength to the idea that Germany (the father) has demolished life.

Stanza 5: Again, the narrator addresses the father as you, a direct address which brings the reader closer to the action. I never could talk to you seems to come right from the daughter's heart. Plath is hinting at a lack of communication, of instability and paralysis. Note the use of the line endings two, you, and you—the train building up momentum.

Stanza 6: The use of barb wire snare ratchets up the tension. The narrator is in pain for the first time. The German ich (I) is repeated four times as if her sense of self-worth is in question (or is she recalling the father shouting I,I,I,I?). And is she unable to speak because of the shock or just difficulty with the language? The father is seen as an all-powerful icon; he even represents all Germans.

Stanza 7: As the steam engine chugs on, the narrator reveals that this is no ordinary train she is on. It is a death train taking her off to a concentration camp, one of the Nazi death factories where millions of Jews were cruelly gassed and cremated during World War II. The narrator now identifies fully with the Jews.

Stanza 8: Moving on, into Austria, the country where Plath's mother was born, the narrator reinforces her identity—she is a bit of a Jew because she carries a Taroc (Tarot) pack of cards and has gypsy blood in her. Perhaps she is a fortune teller able to predict the fate of people? Plath was keenly interested in the Tarot card symbols. Some believe that certain poems in her book Ariel use similar occult symbology.

Stanza 9: Although Plath's father was never a Nazi in real life, her narrator again focuses on the second world war and the image of the Nazi soldier. Part nonsense nursery rhyme, part dark lyrical attack, the girl describes the ideal Aryan male. One of the aims of the Nazis was to breed out unwanted genetic strains to produce the perfect German, an Aryan. This one happens to speak gobbledygoo, a play on the word gobbledygook, meaning excessive use of technical terms. The Luftwaffe is the German air force. Panzer is the name for the German tank corps.

Stanza 10: Yet another metaphor—father as swastika, the ancient Indian symbol used by the Nazis. In this instance, the swastika is so big it blacks out the entire sky. This could be a reference to the air raids over England during the war, when the Luftwaffe bombed many cities and turned the sky black. Lines 48-50 are controversial but probably allude to the fact that powerful despotic males, brutes in boots, often demand the attraction of female victims.

Stanza 11: Perhaps the most personal of stanzas. This image breaks through into the poem and the reader is taken into a kind of classroom (her father Otto was a teacher) where daddy stands. The devil is supposed to have a cleft foot but here, he has a cleft chin. The narrator isn't fooled.

Stanza 12: She knows that this is the man who tore her apart, reached inside, and left her split, a divided self. Sylvia's father died when she was 8, filling her up with rage against God. And at 20, Plath attempted suicide for the first time. Was she wanting to re-unite with her father?

Stanza 13: A crucial stanza, where the girl 'creates' male number two, based on the father. The narrator is pulled out of the sack and 'they' stick her back together with glue. Bones out of a sack—Sylvia Plath was 'glued' back together by doctors after her failed suicide attempt but was never the same again. In the poem, this suicide attempt is a catalyst for action. The girl creates a model (a voodoo-like doll?), a version of her father. This replica strongly resembles Plath's husband, Ted Hughes. He has a Meinkampf look (Mein Kampf is the title of Adolf Hitler's book, which means my struggle) and is not averse to torture.

Stanza 14: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes were married, hence the line with I do, I do. The speaker addresses daddy again, for the last time. There'll be no more communication, no voices from the past. Note the emphasis on "black" again. This telephone belongs to the father.

Stanza 15: The penultimate five lines. The speaker has achieved her double killing, both father and husband have been dispatched. The latter is referred to as a vampire who has been drinking her blood for seven years. It's as if the narrator is reassuring her father that all is well now. He can lie back in readiness. For what?

Stanza 16: The father's fat black heart is pierced by a wooden stake, just like a vampire, and the villagers are thoroughly happy about it. But, just who are the villagers? Are they the inhabitants of a village in the allegory, or are they a collective of Sylvia Plath's imagination? Either way, the father's demise has them dancing and stamping on him in an almost jovial way. To put the lid on things, the girl declares daddy a bastard. The exorcism is over, the conflict resolved.