| Daddy by: Sylvia Plath |
| 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 gray 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 gipsy ancestress and my weird luck And my Taroc pack and my Taroc 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. |
From the beginning of this piece you know from the title that the poem has something to do with Plath's father figure, but from the outset it's impossible to tell what that connection is. In the first Stanza references a Black shoe and her being a foot inside that shoe. The weird part is where she talks about not being able to breath within the shoe, melding the comparison between the foot and herself, because obviously feet don't breathe but people don't go in shoes...which one is it Plath?
The first part of the second stanza has violent undertones, claiming Plath wanted to kill her father in some way, but the second part of the Stanza has nothing to do with that, coming back to the foot analogy, she's claiming her father died before she had the chance to kill him, but these lines about a giant statue make it seem as though she's claiming he's immortal, a stone-like presence.
In the next few stanzas we move out of the metaphorical a little bit, because it seems like Plath is literally talking about a trip to Germany and Poland, maybe her father was actually a Nazi or that's just how she felt about him but that's obviously the point she's trying to get across here.
Later she claims that every woman adores a fascist, but that doesn't make sense when it seems that she's been constantly claiming to this point that she hates the man and she wishes she had killed him. She claims that she tried to get back to him, so there's obviously some contradiction here between her hate for her father and her love for him, and she even goes so far as to contradict and rewrite some of the same things she was saying about him being like a Nazi to her, saying that the cleft wasn't actually in his boots, just in his chin.
She goes on once again to compare him to something immortal, a vampire, so that even though she claims for most of the poem that she's dismissing him even at the very end there's the claim that he will always be there.
No comments:
Post a Comment