DADDY - POEM - SYLVIA PLATH

About Poet-

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.

About Poem-

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 imagery.

Daddy

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.

Explanatory Notes

The basic tension in the poem is explained by a note Sylvia Plath wrote, The poem is 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 part Jewish. In the daughter the two strains marry and paralyse each other-she has to act out the awful little allegory once over before she is free of it.' This shows how the poet looks at herself in an impersonal way. Thus, what is basically personal, and so, confessional, becomes impersonal and universal in the poem. A critic rightly says, "Daddy" achieves the classic act of generalisation, translating a private, obviously intolerable hurt concern us all' (George Steiner, in 'Dying is an Art,' in The Art of Sylvia into a code of plain statement, of instantaneously public images which Plath, ed. Charles Newman).

For convenience, the poem could be divided into three parts: Stanzas 1 to 3, 4 to 10 and 11 to 16. The first part introduces the girl's psychological complex; the second universalises it by referring it to the European context of the World War II situation and the third and final part gives the resolution of the complex in which we are told how the girl marries and through her marriage 'kills' her father.

Line 2. black shoe: the black colour and the shoe refer to Nazi persecution

Lines 2-3. black shoe... foot: image hinting at the Electra complex

Line 4. poor and white: without air and light

Line 6. Daddy... you: an instance of ritual assassination

Lines 8-9. Marble-heavy... statue: This image of the statue brings out the girl's admiration and hatred for her father.

Line 12. green over blue: bright colours associated with life

Lines 16-20. The poet's father, Otto Emil Plath, emigrated to America from Grabow, a town on the Polish Corridor

Line 26. barb wire snare: reference to concentration camps where Jews were imprisoned in World War II

Line 35. I think... Jew: Sylvia Plath's mother was of Austrian descent and possibly had a Jewish strain in her ancestry.

Lines 48-50. Every woman Like you: note the 'truth' concerning feminine psychology in line 48 and the violence and savagery of the images in lines 49-50

Lines 53-54. The devil, proverbially, has a cleft foot

Line 57. The poet was only nine when her father died

Line 58. At twenty... die: while staying with her parents, Plath attempted suicide in 1953 by swallowing sleeping pills

Lines 63-67. She married a man who, she thought, resembled her father, notice the use of Freudian psychology. Plath married Ted Hughes, the English poet.

Line 76. The 'killing of her father by a stake driven through his heart obliterated her memories of him.

Glossary

Line 10. Frisco - San Francisco

Line 10. seal - aquatic animal

Line 15. Ach du - German for 'O, you!'

Line 27. Ich - German for 'T'

Line 33. Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen - places where Nazi concentration camps were situated in southeast Germany, southwest Poland and northeast West Germany respectively.

Line 39. Taroc pack - cards used for fortune telling

Line 42. Luftwaffe - German air force

Line 42. gobbledygoo - i.e., gobbledygook; official language full of jargon

Line 44. Aryan - the Aryan race; the Nazis claimed to be of pure Aryan descent

Line 45. Panzer-man - armoured man of the tank force in Nazi army Line 46. swastika the Aryan emblem, revived by the Nazis as their symbol

Line 65. Meinkampf - referring to a Nazi; Meinkampf (My Fight), the autobiography of Hitler (1889-1945) sets forth his political philosophy for the German conquest of Europe

Line 77. vampire - evil spirit.