Plath's 'Daddy'
Killing the Dead
Linda Sue Grimes
In Sylvia Plath's poem "Daddy," the speaker denigrates the addressee to the point of insisting that he died before she could kill him.
The poem, “Daddy,” has sixteen five-line stanzas; there is one rime that appears inconsistently throughout the poem: for example, the first line is “You do not do, you do not do,” and line two and line five rime with line one. In the second stanza, the riming line is only line one. In stanza three, lines two, four, and five contain the rime with “do.” And it proceeds this way throughout the sixteen stanzas.
First Stanza – I lived in a black shoe for thirty years
The speaker begins with a taunting “You do not do, you do not do / Any more, black shoe / In which I have lived like a foot / For thirty years.” In the second line, it sounds as if the speaker is name-calling someone “black shoe,” but then as she continues, she claims she had lived in that shoe for thirty years. And she shows her dissatisfaction by asserting that she was “poor and white” and could hardly breathe, and she even feared to sneeze.
Second Stanza – “Daddy, I have had to kill you”
By the second stanza, the speaker is out of control with hatred and disgust at the character she refers to as Daddy. She seems annoyed that this character died before she had a chance to kill him, but now in her fits of pique, she is getting back at him but good. Again reverting to disgusting description and name-calling, she exclaims, “Marble-heavy, a bag full of God, / Ghastly statue with one gray toe.”
Third Stanza – “I used to pray to recover you”
In this stanza, the speaker continues with description that denigrates the addressee, until she asserts that she used to pray that he would return to her. It is at this point that the reader becomes aware that the speaker apparently does not harbor total hatred for her deceased Daddy, or at least earlier in her life, she actually wished he were still in her life.
Fourth through Eighth Stanzas – “In the German tongue” . . . “Chuffing me off like a Jew”
In these stanzas, the speaker once again loses herself in delirium, metaphorically likening the Daddy to a Nazi and herself to a Jew in death camps such as Dachau and Auschwitz. She rails against Daddy: “I never could talk to you. / The tongue stuck in my jaw.” Her tongue “stuck in a barb wire snare.” She spits out her bitter comparison: “I began to talk like a Jew. / I think I may well be a Jew.” It is unclear whether the speaker means that she could not talk to him before he died or she is simply angry that the died and thus she could not talk to him.
Adolescent daughters often feel stifled by parental rules, but this daughter’s father, as far as the reader can discern, has committed only the unpardonable sin of dying, which was, of course, out of his control. It becomes apparent that this Nazi metaphor lives and thrives only in the mind of the obsessed speaker. It does not work to dramatize any credible experience, because the speaker has not experienced the drama she is trying to portray. Such fantasy suggests the psychological imbalance of the speaker, because she cannot, in fact, be in her adolescent years: she has to at least thirty.
Ninth through Sixteenth Stanzas
These stanzas are punctuated by lines such as “I may be a bit of a Jew,” “I have always been scared ofyou,”“Every woman adores a Fascist,” “Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You— / Not God but a swastika.” All of these lines are in service of painting the Daddy as an evil dictator.
By the last stanza, the speaker has descended into total madness as she screams: “There’s a stake in your fat black heart / And the villagers never liked you. / They are dancing and stamping on you. / They alwaysknewit was you. / Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.”
Commentary
The poem dramatizes the adolescent bullying by an adult woman of a man who has died. About this poem, Plath has explained, "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 before she is free of it."
Plath's masterful handling of such raw material plumbs the depth of the anger that causes the speaker to lose herself in a frenetic orgy of emotion.