Daddy By Sylvia Plath Analysis

The figurative language in the poem “Daddy” by Sylvia Plath can be used to discover a deeper significant of the poem. By using figurative language throughout the poem such as symbolism, imagery, and wordplay, Plath reveals hidden messages about her relationship with her father. Plath uses symbols of Nazis, vampires, size, and communication to help reveal a message about her dad.

Sylvia Plath uses her poem, Daddy, to express deep emotions toward her father’s life and death. With passionate articulation, she verbally turns over her feelings of rage, abandonment, confusion and grief. Though this work is fraught with ambiguity, a reader can infer Plath’s basic story. Her father was apparently a Nazi soldier killed in World War II while she was young. Her statements about not knowing even remotely where he was while he was in battle, the only photograph she has left of him and how she chose to marry a man that reminded her of him elude to her grief in losing her father and missing his presence. She also expresses a dark anger toward him for his political views and actions

Throughout the poem, the speaker uses specific details that show the conflict between the speaker’s son and his parents. In the first stanza, the speaker recalls exchanges of dialogue between the speaker and his or her son. For example, the speaker’s son exclaims, “I did the problem / and my teacher said I was right!” (Nye 3-4). The child validated his teacher’s opinion but ridiculed his parents’ opinion. This is further explained through more details in a later part of the same stanza. The mother explains how the son believed his parents were “idiots / without worksheets to back us up” (Nye 9-10). The speaker’s son had entrusted his teacher and thought of his teacher as highly intelligent, but believed that way because of foolish reasoning. In addition, the speaker lists examples of minor mistakes the parents made that caused the son to be embarrassed of them. Through distinct details, the speaker describes how the son’s “mother never remembers / what a megabyte means and his dad fainted on an airplane once / and smashed his head on the drinks cart” (Nye 10-12). By choosing to include these particular details, the poet outlines the foundation of the conflict between the son and his parents.

It tends to be the trend for women who have had traumatic childhoods to be attracted to men who epitomize their emptiness felt as children. Women who have had unaffectionate or absent fathers, adulterous husbands or boyfriends, or relatives who molested them seem to become involved in relationships with men who, instead of being the opposite of the “monsters” in their lives, are the exact replicas of these ugly men. Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy” is a perfect example of this unfortunate trend. In this poem, she speaks directly to her dead father and her husband who has been cheating on her, as the poem so indicates.

In the first stanza the reader realizes that Sylvia Plath is scared of her father. It is quite clear that she never spoke up to him to defend herself. In the first line it is apparent that something is ending. “You do not do, you do not do any more,

Written shortly after the conclusion of the second world war, Sylvia Plath published ‘Daddy’ to great controversy, with critics denouncing the poem’s many insensitive uses of Holocaust imagery. ‘Daddy’ is not, however, a poem that minimizes the tremendous atrocities endured by the Jewish people, but rather enlarges the reader’s understanding of how devastating are the effects of abuse by parallelizing the suffering of the Jews with the psychological trauma of abuse.

The poem seems to be narrative.  It conveys not only a story about his daughter, but a story of life, and paints distinctive images in the reader’s mind.

It is clear that the speaker is feeling threatened by the boy facing her. In lines 13 through 17, it is very obvious that she is fearful “I look at his raw face, he looks at my fur coat, and I don’t know if i am in his power- he could take my coat so easily, my briefcase, my life-”. Yet the speaker's tone shifts to sympathetic at line 18 of the poem when she realizes the color of their skin dictates their lives; “the way i am living off his life, eating the steak he does not eat, as if i am taking the food from his mouth”. This is where her thoughts become less about impressions and more inward

The speaker utilizes the word "you" which gets the reader's attention with an accusatory tone and bringing about the reader to recognize that they might play a role in oppressing others in their own lives. This creates the poem more personal and the tone she utilizes all over the poem to convey her opinion and feelings on the matter assists the accusatory tone of the

In Sylvia Plath’s free verse poem, “Daddy,” she describes her hatred towards her deceased father. Plath uses tone, figures of speech, and symbols to illustrate her extreme anger and female protest towards the man that raised her. Sylvia Plath has a dark, bitter tone in “Daddy.” She recalls all the pain that her father has put her through, even after his death.

Fascism is a rule of an oppressive government, limiting the freedom and rights of its people. Throughout her poem, “Daddy,” Plath alludes that her father and husband were similar tyrannical figures that tried to dominate her in almost every aspect of her life. Using the “victim card,” Plath’s metaphorical examples, such as being compared to a “Jew” from Nazi Germany, enable her to paint a picture of how she played the prey under an authoritarian rule. Silvia Plath’s line: “Every woman adores a Fascist” (48), is an extremely sarcastic remark used to mock the idea of man being able to control and dominate a woman’s life.

The power of Plath's Daddy to threaten, shock and move the reader remains undiminished, years after it was written. To the unsuspecting reader, the experience of first reading "Daddy" is a confusion of discomfort, excitement and guilty pleasure, for the pleasures of revenge are said to be sweet, and this is a revenge poem of the first rank. Revenge upon whom? Father? Perhaps, more likely, upon her husband. And her aim was true, for if anything Plath wrote damaged Ted Hughes for posterity, "Daddy" is it. From this poem, we gather our indelible impressions of Hughes as a brute, a wife beater, a vampire, even an implied racist and murderer (if we extend the Hitler metaphor to its fullest implications)

Strong images are presented throughout the poem. The words "marble-heavy, a bag full of God" convey the omniscience of her father's authority and the weight it imposed on her throughout her life. Another strong image is the comparison of Plath’s husband to a vampire: “The vampire who said he was you / And drank my blood for a year, / Seven years, if you want to know.” This stanza accounts the way Plath’s husband stripped her of her sense of self. Plath gave Hughes her trust and he gained total control over her, which he used to his advantage, thus “drinking her blood.” Additionally, Hughes and Plath were married for exactly seven years before he left

Continuing with the theme of human suffering, another of Plath’s most important ideas is that throughout history, women have been oppressed. Plath expresses this idea in many of her texts such as, Daddy, Lady Lazarus, Never Try to Trick Me with a Kiss, Munich Mannequins and many more. One of Plath’s most effective and commonly used techniques used to express this idea is historical and religious allusion. Specifically, in her 1963 poem Daddy, the use of historical allusion can be seen throughout the entirety of the text. Plath demonstrates the fear and oppression she experienced with her father by writing “I think I may well be a Jew”. This is historically contextual as Plath’s father was a German immigrant and by referring to herself as a

“Daddy” is written from the perspective of a young woman addressing her late father. I believe this poem to be partially autobiographical and partially not, based on publicly-known facts about Plath’s life and her father. In the first stanza Plath makes direct reference to the way in which her father died; “You do not do, you do not do/ Any more, black shoe” which could be interpreted as describing her father’s gangrenous foot (Plath’s father died of untreated diabetes). A second allusion is made to the foot in the third line of the second stanza - “Ghastly statue with one gray toe” – which closely ties the image of a foot to death. Finally, in the fifth stanza, Plath writes “So I never could tell where you/ Put your foot, your root” which could be another reference to her father’s foot, especially since the word root is so close to rot in its spelling.