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✏️Summary & Analysis

💭The poem daddy is a dramatic monologue in which a daughter verbally assassinates her father. The poem is a phantasy created out of the poet’s obsessive belief that her father’s pure Prussian ancestry could have made him a Nazi and her mother’s Jewish background might have consigned her to a concentration camp. The tension that develops from this situation is the main spring of the poem.

💭Sylvia Plath’s own note to this poem reads: ‘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 merge and paralyze each other. She has to act out the awful allegory once over before she is free of it.

💭Based on the ‘Electra Complex’ of Freudian psychology, the poem presents a situation in which the daughter is ‘in love’ with the father. She simultaneously hates and admires him and the conflicting emotions restrict and dwarf her life to such an extent that she must get rid of the situation by killing him. But first she tries to join him through suicide, later through marriage to a man who shares many of the father’s qualities.

💭The suffocation the poetess suffered due to the Electra complex is identified with that of a foot shut up in a black shoe. The colour black and the shoe are emblematic of the Nazi persecution. The poetess says for thirty years she has lived like a foot in the black shoe daring not even to breathe. The poet confesses that she had to kill her father. But she was absolved from the sin of patricide as her father had died before she had time to assassinate him. The poetess’s ambivalent attitude to the father with its mingled admiration and hate is effectively brought out by the images of ‘marble- heavy, a bag full of god’ and ghastly statue with one grey toe’.

💭"Daddy" is a controversial and highly anthologized poem by the American poet Sylvia Plath. Published posthumously in 1965 as part of the collection Ariel, the poem was originally written in October 1962, a month after Plath's separation from her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, and four months before her death by suicide. It is a deeply complex poem informed by the poet's relationship with her deceased father, Otto Plath. Told from the perspective of a woman addressing her father, the memory of whom has an oppressive power over her, the poem details the speaker's struggle to break free of his influence.

💭Sylvia Plath is most known for her tortured soul. Perhaps that is why readers identify with her works of poetry so well, such as ‘Daddy’. She has an uncanny ability to give meaningful words to some of the most inexpressible emotions. She writes in a way that allows the reader to feel her pain. In this poem, ‘Daddy’, she writes about her father after his death. This is not a typical obituary poem, lamenting the loss of the loved one, wishing for his return, and hoping to see him again. Rather, Plath feels a sense of relief at his departure from her life. She explores the reasons behind this feeling in the lines of this poem.

💭Otto Emil Plath, the poetess’ father immigrated to America from a Polish town. The poetess blindly believed that her father’s pure Prussian ancestry could have made him a Nazi. She says: “I never could talk to you/ the tongue stuck in my jaw/ the tongue stuck in barbed wire snare/ Ich. Ich. Ich. / l could hardly speak’. Barbed wire snare is a reference to the concentration camps where Jews were incarcerates by the Nazis during the World War II. The poetess makes a reference to the trains carrying Jewish prisoners to various concentration camps. She had an obsession that every German she met was her father.

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