Source: Author Amok
“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.”
Introduction
Poem’s Name - Daddy
Poet’s Name - Sylvia Plath
Genre - Confessional Poetry
Collected in - Ariel, 1965
Language - English
Poem Summary
The speaker opens the poem by lamenting her current circumstances. She likens herself to a foot encased in a black shoe. She's been like this for 30 years, devoid of color and lacking the courage to breathe or sneeze. She then confronts her father, telling him that she had no choice but to kill him, however, she later claims that he died before she could do so.
Her father, she says, is as heavy as marble and looks like a terrifying statue. She then relates him to Germans, claiming she was unable to speak because her tongue was stuck in barbed wire. She equates herself to a Jew and claims to have started speaking in a Jewish manner. She has always been terrified of her father.
She was ten when he died and twenty when she tried, but failed, to commit suicide to reunite with him. Then she created a model of her father, who she married, and refers to him as a vampire who drank her blood for 7 years. Finally, she tells her father that he is free to relax now. She said the people despised him and are now dancing and trampling on his corpse.
About Sylvia Plath
Source: BBC
Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963) was a poet, novelist, and short-story writer born in Boston, Massachusetts. She is noted for popularising confessional poetry, and her most well-known works are The Colossus and Other Poems (1960) and Ariel (1965), as well as The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical book published soon before her death in 1963.
The Collected Poems, which includes previously unreleased works, was published in 1981. Plath was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1982 for this book, making her the fourth person to receive the prize posthumously. ‘Daddy’ was written in October 1962, 4 months before her death and one month after her separation from Ted Hughes.
Source: The Sun
Plath was chronically depressed for the majority of her adult life and was treated with electroconvulsive therapy several times. She tried to commit suicide many times and at last, in 1963, was successful. She stuck her head in the oven with the gas on and died of carbon monoxide poisoning. The anxiety, confusion, and suicidal thoughts she experienced are painfully evident in her works.
Psychological Analysis
The speaker of the poem had revered her father since she was a youngster, but she soon realizes that his legacy is one of brutality and oppression. She spends the poem struggling to break free from his grip on her, yet the poem isn't just about this one relationship. Instead, the speaker's relationship to her father's memories might be viewed as a metaphor for the patriarchal society's overall power imbalance between men and women.
Women are subjected to strict regulations and violence at the hands of men in such a world, according to the poem, limiting their individuality, self-expression, and independence. She hints that she has been entirely suffocated by the presence of her father, who is further depicted as a giant statue, weighty as "marble" or "a bag full of God," by comparing herself to a foot that has lived inside a "black shoe... for thirty years," too terrified to even breathe.
Even in recollection, all of these characteristics underline the speaker's father's immense weight and width, which seems to press down on the speaker years after his death. How she constantly explicitly conflates her father to Nazis and herself to Jews also reveals how powerless she feels against him and when she says that every woman adores a fascist i.e. a Nazi, shows the normalization of violence against women.
She uses the metaphor of a vampire which shows her view of her father and then her husband as someone who sucked all the life out of her. The whole poem is like a painting of the various scenes from her life that were the most excruciating for her.
This poem is Sylvia Plath letting go of all the resentment that she had held onto her whole life. It's all her anger, and maybe even regret she feels towards her father, that she kept inside her heart and that’s finally taken the form of poetry.
Summing Up
When her father died, she said that “I will never speak to God again”. For her, her father was a God and his death clearly hit her very hard. But her poem Daddy isn’t like the normal elegies we see where the poet is mourning someone’s loss or wishing for their return. Rather it's quite the opposite. She conveys her relief at her father’s death and his disappearance from her life forever.
Sylvia Plath is known to have been a troubled soul. Maybe it was because she was so deep into the well of darkness but one of the reasons why people relate to her poems is her amazing ability to turn emotions into words, even the most indescribable ones, and in such a way that it almost feels like your own pain.
My ratings of the poem: 3.5 on 5
Written By - Sanjana Chaudhary
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