Post discussion comments about Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy” in the week 7 forum. Post one new comment and two replies.
Explain why you think Plath’s “Daddy” is so often taught in college classes and why it is considered a great poem.
Sylvia Plath, “Daddy” (1962)
Plath’s most famous (and most controversial) poem, “Daddy,” is often read as a
work of autobiography by many who learn of Sylvia Plath’s suicide in 1963. Still, it is
important to try to read a work of literature as more than what Wordsworth called in
1798 “a spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling”—a reflection of the poet’s
emotions. In terms of the time frame of the poem, remember that Plath belonged to the
post-World War II generation; the outrages of the Holocaust were still within recent
memory. Additionally, the women’s liberation movement had not yet begun, and Plath
came from a world of traditionalism, one which repressed the voices of rebellion.
Plath’s father taught German and biology—and note the references to things
German, with an almost nursery-rhyme cadence: “Ach, du” (line 15), “I thought every
German was you. / And the language obscene” (29-30), and “I have always been scared
of you, / With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygook” (41-42). She recalls a picture of him,
and uses a devilish metaphor:
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
(51-54)
Also, Plath refers to herself, metaphorically, as a “Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen”
(33)—all names of concentration camps during World War II. So, the cruelty in this
metaphor is obvious, as in the following lines: “Every woman adores a Fascist, / The
boot in the face, the brute / Brute heart of a brute like you” (48-50). Still, note the
complexity of the relationship—as Plath recalls the utter despair at the time of her
father’s death:
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
(57-65)
The poet Ted Hughes (Plath’s husband) suffered a loss of reputation after Plath’s death
and poems such as “Daddy” were published. (Meinkampf was the title of Hitler’s
autobiography). Plath also makes use of vampire imagery:
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.
(71-78)
Has Plath gone too far in comparing herself to a Jew in Hitler’s Germany or a villager
who drives a stake in the heart of a vampire? How literally is this poem to be read? Is Plath angry with her father because he died when she was so young? What does she
mean in the last line when she writes “I’m through” (80).
