Dear Sylvia Plath, you were not a victim of the Holocaust. Love, Lizzy

“Daddy” is one sick and twisted poem, but that’s a normal thing for Sylvia Plath. Plath is known for her confessional style of poetry. “Daddy” is a bit hard to understand without previous knowledge regarding Sylvia Plath’s past and her father. Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932. Her mother, Aurelia Schober Plath, was a first-generation American of Austrian descent and her father, Otto Emile Plath, was an immigrant from Grabow, Poland, and was twenty-one years older than Sylvia’s mother. Otto Plath died on November 5, 1940 (when Sylvia was eight years old) of complications following the amputation of a leg due to diabetes mellitus (a treatable disease at the time). During Sylvia’s college years, she attempted suicide. Sylvia Plath later married British poet Ted Hughes, and produced two children with him, but separated in late 1962 after her husband’s affair with poet Assia Wevill came to light. She committed suicide on February 11, 1963, at the age of 30.
The subject of “Daddy” is not just Sylvia’s father but also her husband. Sylvia Plath lost her father at a tender age when she really adored him, but then later realized that her father was an oppressive man who did not treat his children or his wife very well. She compares his oppressiveness to that of a Nazi, an image used throughout the poem. Sylvia Plath conveys her intense emotions toward her father and estranged husband through vivid, often disturbing, imagery. She compares herself to a foot that lives in a shoe (line 2 – 3), being smothered by her father. She specifically gives writes that the shoe is black, a color often associated with death. The shoe metaphor continues when she compares her father to “the boot in the face” (line 49). The foot image is referred to again when she compares the cleft in her father’s chin to the cleft in the devil’s hooves (lines 53 – 54).
Sylvia’s father generally put his religion before his family, which greatly disturbed Sylvia both at the time of her father’s death and later on in her life. When she writes, “a bag full of God, ghastly statue with one grey toe,” (lines 8 – 9), she is describing her father as religion-centered (“bag full of God”), cold (“ghastly statue”) and she describes the leg amputation that killed him as “one grey toe.” The poem is also very autobiographical when the speaker talks about her attempted suicide. “At twenty I tried to die / And get back, back, back to you. … But they pulled me out of the sack / And they stuck me together with glue” (lines 58 – 62) is Sylvia Plath talking about her attempt to take her own life in her college days, and partially blaming it on her father.
She begins to speak about her husband in the second half of the poem. She realizes that her husband and her father were very similar people. She acknowledges that her husband and her father were very similar when she says, “And then I knew what to do / I made a model of you / a man in black with a Meinkampf look” (lines 63 – 65). Her husband is the “man in black with a Meinkampf look”. Her illustration of her husband also extends the Nazi metaphor present in most of the poem. When the tone of the poem changes to self-confident, she says, “If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two / The vampire who said he was you / And drank my blood for a year” (lines 71 – 73) , conveying her awareness of the similarities to the destructive behaviors of her father and her husband. The image of a vampire suggests draining; in Sylvia Plath’s case, her husband drained her of her life during their marriage.
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the poem “Daddy” is Sylvia Plath’s repeated use of Nazi and Holocaust images. Her father was Polish, but not a Nazi, and her mother was part Jewish. Sylvia Plath’s comparisons of her father to a Nazi and her to a Jew show how strongly she felt oppressed and smothered by his rule of her life, even after his death. When she writes, “I thought every German was you.” (line 29), she is telling her inability to escape from her father despite him physically being gone. The meaning of the Nazi imagery in “Daddy” is for Sylvia Plath to describe just how much intense pain her father (and husband) put her through: pain similar to that felt by Jews during the Holocaust.
“Daddy” is irregular in rhyme. At times, it has a nursery rhyme-like quality to it, such as, “You do not do, you do not do / any more, black shoe” (lines1 – 2). The lack of regular rhyming pattern is similar to the lack of a father Sylvia Plath had much of her life: changing from a child-like innocence to a dark, hate-filled imagery. The poem is written in short stanzas of five lines each that are not very long or worded complicated.
The tone of the poem is Sylvia Plath’s outrage at her father and her husband for ruining her life. Sometimes this outrage becomes child-like, like a kid sobbing and smashing her fists on a table. This is evidenced by the use of the word “Daddy” and ending the poem with “Daddy, Daddy, you bastard, I’m through.” When she speaks about her father in the poem, she reflects a child-like fear in her language, for example when she says, “I have always been scared of you” (line 41) and “So daddy, I’m finally through” (line 68).
The last two stanzas of the poem show Sylvia Plath overcoming her fear of her father and fear of her husband. “There’s a stake in your fat black heart / And the villagers never liked you” (lines 76 – 77) signify her newfound confidence to confront her father. She has overcome the memory of her father. Any self-doubt has been eliminated with the last line, “Daddy, Daddy, you bastard, I’m through.” Sylvia Plath has finally conquered the fears of her father and her husband in the poem, but her suicide in real life begs to differ. (1039)