Sylvia Plath: 'Daddy'

[heinzs]

An interesting excursion found me this piece by Sylvia Plath:

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 Tarot pack and my Tarot pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of *you*,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
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.

-- Sylvia Plath

[thief of dreams]

yea i was led to this also.. just couldnt quite make the connection... hmm.. strange... and she made it sound like his books would be hard to come by so im thinking maybe it is the UK author and maybe the poem in question is something he wrote in between the chapters of a story... ??? dont know...

[Floetry Spades]

I thought this was the poem that boy was trying to find. The one by patrick middleton......never mind it's not written by the right person.

[Debbie]

This is sure one angry poem...
Germans and Jews...
twas a terrible ordeal...

[Eternum 1]

Interesting excursion it must have been Heinzs. I'm a fan of SP for many reasons some voyeuristic and some personal. This particular piece about a fascination with fascism still makes the hair stand up on the nape of my neck. I first read this in my college days when Fromm was in vogue and Jerzey Kosinski had just released his novel the "Painted Bird". Again the theme was the almost hypntoic fascination of the prey to the predator.

Some of my old college freinds told me that Plath presumed too much about the holocaust and that only a survivor deserved the audience she was getting. I don't agree, as the moral question in the balance is one for everyone and not just the criminals and their victims.

With this in mind I penned a piece about Darfur recently just as I have in the past about Cambodia and Rwanda. Am I being ghoulish for riding coach behind the cattle cars? Perhaps, but to pretend it's not my concern or place to say anything would be a crime even worse to my conscience.

And as far as the symbolic death of Daddy, written here, I can relate to that as well for upon my return from Cuba I showed my family one of the first english copies of Ches diary only to face a storm of commie traveller accusations on top of a travel ban to the U.S.

I won't belabor this thread with other comparisons to fascism save to say that it is an ever present danger of masochistic fascination wrapped up in every flag and patriotic march.

Frankly SP's life and death are like members of my family, familiar yet disturbing to my psyche.

Sorry for the long winded reply,

ET

[heinzs]

Thanks Debbie. It is a poem filled with lots of twists.

Enjoyed reading your ramble, ET. I much appreciate your grasp on reality.

[Richard taylor]

excellent i did one which was inspired by sylvia heinzs i'll post it
richard

[Eternum 1]

[ninian]

There is a lot of analysis that suggests that Plath wrote Daddy about her life with poet Ted Hughes, comparing it to her life with her father - an oppressive and controlling man.

Her intense feelings about the controlling men in her life are not to be ignored because of the imagery she uses, the comparison to Nazi treatment of Jews.

Be that as it may, I am amazed at the power of the anger in this poem - as if of an adult who slips into childlike sobs, especially with the use of "Daddy".

We did an analysis of it in my Advanced Creative Writing: Poetry course at the University. I should dig up my old notes and see what people had to say.

Ninian

[heinzs]

I'd love to see a broader analysis from more professional and non-professional viewpoints. Trying to understand the intricacies and nuances of one poem is an event unto itself.

[richie]

I love her work the "Mirror" is my fav- i'll give it a try H in a few days have to print this and study it

richie

[Eternum 1]

I agree with Ninian in the context that this piece is very much about control and who has power. When you think about the Nazi regime and compare the liberation of concentration camps to the daily news about women and children fleeing houses of horror, there is a common denominator. A prepondering imbalance of masculinity that seeks to crush the nurturing feminine side of human nature.

Throughout modern history, I believe, we see a disturbing trend that takes the noble urge of a man to defend his loved ones and perverts it into a form of tribal hysteria where the culture glorifies making fierce noises and shaking spears at one another. We have abandoned all our Goddesses and feminine avatars leaving Mars and his later incarnations as a vengeful lord or prophet of retribution to swagger about unopposed.

It's all yin and yang and what the Buddhists call walking the middle path wherin lies harmony and there is no delight in causing suffering. Including suffering sanctified by testosterone based religion.

For me, it doesn't really matter if it's a Hitler figure (regarded at the time as a father by his people) or an actual "Daddy" or an abusive husband. I see this not as a bizarre or unique case but rather, Plath's indictment of a culture (exemplified in mid 20th century Germany) that is obsessed with power and in particular masculine power projected through corporations and military swagger.

One has only to look at Bush landing on an aircraft carrier while 'pickles' is relegated to story time at the local library to see that 'Daddy' is alive and well in our culture.

ET

[richie]

On my first reading I understood it though to do that one must understand
Sylvia, this poem as nothing to do with Hitler, or concentration camps
Those are simply symbolic gestures this is all to do with the two men in her life her “DADDY and her HUSBAND” its all in the poem however ambiguous the Vampire is the father the “seven years” the husband the “gangrene” her father died from Gangrene on his toe when she was 10. "The grey colour of the toe” again Refers to her fathers death, this is all about love/hate, the two men who Left her. It seems more to be about the death, the memory, and the shortness of life. The significance of the first half of the poem. The unwilled paths, symbolising the shortness of human life, the inadequacy of human experience, the indifference of nature? This reading would be coherent with the fathers grave the husband brought in at the end, I looked for deeper significance in the poem but the symbolic reference to Germany, is an obvious linking the dead father's 'legacy' with the paths, of her own life that is the deeper significance here.
Her father’s native language was German if you read the poem a few times you Will notice her husband comes into it in the second half of the poem The obvious. Intention behind using the possessiveness in these two main people In her life. I believe it also shows her desolation her state of mind losing her “DADDY” Not being able to grow with him to change him the chance to in the end love him.

Last night I went onto her site to read a few poems I quite by chance found this Review of the poem and as I had already wrote this I have left my own review as I wrote It

Richard Taylor
-----------------------------------------------------

Sylvia the Vampire Slayer
The poem "Daddy" by Sylvia Plath concludes with the symbolic scene of the speaker killing her vampire father. On an obvious level this represents Plath's struggle to deal with the haunting influence of her own father who died when she was a little girl. However, as Mary G. DeJong points out, "Now that Plath's work is better known, ‘Daddy' is generally recognized as more than a confession of her personal feelings towards her father" (34-35). In the context of the poem the scene's symbolism becomes ambiguous because mixed in with descriptions of the poet's father are clear references to her husband, who left her for another woman as "Daddy" was being written. The problem for the reader is to figure out what Plath is saying about the connection between the figures of father and husband by tying them together in her poem.
A clue lies in the final image she uses, the vampire. In today's movies and books vampires are portrayed as humans who have gained immortality and power in exchange for the need for blood and avoidance of sunlight and crosses. However, Plath wrote her poem in 1962, and since then our culture's image of the vampire has changed drastically. Historically, people who were transformed into vampires were no longer the same human beings. Instead, they became monsters who retained only the physical appearance of their former selves. Our interpretation of the poem is affected if we assume that when Plath wrote about a vampire she had in mind the older conception of a monster which took over the body of a now dead human. With this image in mind we will tend to look for ways the duality of father and husband in the poem correspond to the vampire's dual identity as dead human and living monster. Appropriately, the poem can be divided roughly in half with the first eight stanzas concerned exclusively with the father and the final eight gradually introducing the husband. In superficial ways the two male figures seem to be the same man, but the speaker has finally come to realize that the one she idolized is gone forever and the one who shares his image is actually a monster.

Although what stands out on first reading "Daddy" is the Nazi imagery, it is interesting to note that the father is not called a Nazi in the first half of the poem. In stanza one he is a " . . . black shoe / In which [she has] lived like a foot" (2-3) which is certainly a stifling image but not yet a clear reference to the father's evil nature. Next he is "Marble heavy, a bag full of God" and a "Ghastly statue" (8-9), images which reveal the daughter's struggle to cope with his death but do not reflect any bad intent on the part of the father. The next two images describe Otto Plath's death, which resulted from gangrene in his toe. According to K.G. Srivastava, "The grey color of the toe [in line 9] refers to the gangrene that Otto Plath contracted" and "The image of ‘Frisco seal' [line 10] recalls the ‘amputation from the thigh of the gangrened foot and leg' and the consequent prosthesis" (127). These references to the father's fatal injury continue to indicate the daughter's trauma, but they still do not paint the man as evil. In fact, these images arouse sympathy for the speaker's father, far from the hate of the rest of the poem. From line 15 to the midway point of "Daddy," Plath begins to use Nazi imagery, but she still does not have her speaker attack the father. Instead, the poem focuses on the daughter's frustrating attempt to connect with her dead father through his native language, German. It is "the language"—not the father —which is " . . . an engine / Chuffing [her] off like a Jew" to the concentration camps she imagines (30-33). We have now reached the center of the poem, yet Plath's speaker has yet to make a clear attack on her father's character.

In the second half of "Daddy," it is difficult at first to pinpoint where the figure of the husband enters the poem. Although the speaker doesn't announce her marriage until line 67, there is reason to believe that she discovers a replacement for her father much earlier. The language of lines 48 to 50, "Every woman adores a Fascist, / The boot in the face, the brute / Brute heart of a brute like you," connotes an abusive relationship between husband and wife, not parent and child. Similarly, the phrase "the black man who / Bit my pretty red heart in two" (55-56) is much more appropriate for a scorned lover than a daughter. The most subtle clue of the shift from father to husband can be found in the first line of the poem's second half. Plath mysteriously italicizes the word "you" when her speaker admits, "I have always been scared of you" (41). A possible explanation is that at this point the word's meaning changes. This does not mean that the husband is the sole focus of the rest of the poem because the photograph of the father as teacher and reference to Plath's suicide attempt clearly invoke incidents in the life of the poet before she married. Instead, references to the two men are mixed together beginning with the italicized "you" of line 41. Analyzing the vampire metaphor makes this pattern quite understandable. When a person is confronted with a monster which resembles her father but is no longer him, she will undoubtedly be extremely confused. At times Plath's speaker addresses the vampire as the new man it is, but she cannot help but fall into the habit of speaking to it as though it were the father it so closely resembles. With this metaphor "Plath now fiercely mocks her desire to fashion a surrogate for her dead father" (Ramazani 1151) by portraying the semi-autobiographical speaker as unable to distinguish between the man she has spent seven years married to and the father who died when she was ten.

It is with the poem's climax, the killing of the vampire, that Plath finally separates the figures of father and husband. Her speaker says the monster "drank my blood for a year, / Seven years if you want to know" (72-74). The period of seven years corresponds exactly to the duration of the poet's marriage, thus identifying the vampire with the husband. Furthermore, Plath's diction in describing the slaying "makes clear the mirror relation between his and her violence" (Ramazani 1151). The daughter avenges the injury to her "pretty red heart" by stabbing the vampire's "fat black heart" (56, 76). Since the original violence was described in language that implicated the husband, it is logical that the revenge is committed against him. Finally, when Plath concludes the poem with a reference to villagers dancing on the vampire's grave, she asserts, "They always knew it was you" (79). This line's meaning is just as mysterious as the earlier use of italics in line 41. One interpretation in keeping with the vampire motif is that the villagers, unlike the speaker, always knew the monster-husband was different from the dead father. In order to kill the vampire, and thereby escape both the husband's control and the father's haunting image, the speaker has had to learn what the villagers already knew: that daddy is gone and that the monster-husband may resemble him but is not him. Once she has overcome the confusion that has been evident since the midway point of the poem, Plath's speaker can finally exorcize her father's memory by rejecting the husband—symbolically killing not one man, but two.

By analyzing "Daddy" in terms of the vampire metaphor we see how the poem attacks the speaker's husband on a symbolic level while condemning her father on a literal level. Although Heather Cam points out that "Otto Plath and Ted Hughes . . . are no more a Nazi Daddy nor ‘a man in black with a Meinkampf look' than Plath is a gipsy Tarot mistress who feels herself to be Jewish" (431), the vampire metaphor corresponds exactly with the poet's situation at the time she wrote the poem. While she had once loved her husband, she was suddenly forced to realize that he was capable of treating her horribly. In writing "Daddy" she seems to have realized the degree to which her feelings of abandonment following her father's death, which was out of Otto Plath's control, set up the devastation she felt following Hughes' departure, which was his conscious action. It is only natural that she would find an image which would link the two men but condemn only Hughes for his abandonment of his family. Seeing Hughes as a monster, Plath wrote "Daddy" in an attempt to overcome her feelings for him while exorcizing the memory of her father's equally painful though unintentional abandonment. Despite the mixing of father and husband in the antagonist of "Daddy" it is obvious which man Sylvia Plath is addressing with the poem's last line, written during the breakup of her marriage and three months before her suicide: "Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through" (80).

Works Cited
Cam, Heather. " ‘Daddy': Sylvia Plath's Debt to Anne Sexton." American Literature 59 (1987): 429-32.
DeJong, Mary G. "Sylvia Plath and Sheila Ballantyne's Imaginary Crimes." Studies in American Fiction 16 (1988): 27-38.

Ramazani, Jahan. " ‘Daddy I Have Had to Kill You': Plath, Rage, and the Modern Elegy." Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 108 (1993): 1142-56.

Srivastava, K.G. "Plath's Daddy." The Explicator 50 (1992): 126-28.

[heinzs]

[Gillian]

Wow. And I just thought it was a poem by Sylvia Plath.

Gillian