Plath then mentions the Luftwaffe or German Air Force and her father's "neat moustache" and "Aryan eye, bright blue" (lines 42-44) which symbolizes the well-groomed appearance of German officers with their blue Aryan eyes. She then calls her father a "Panzer man" (line 45), a metaphor for a German-made armored tank used in battle. Plath also sees her father as worshipping the swastika rather than God (line 46) and then calls him "A man in black with a Meinkampf look" (line 65), a symbol of Adolph Hitler and his autobiography "Mein Kampf." Plath also mentions "the rack and the screw" (line 66) which symbolizes the torture inflicted by the Nazis upon the Jews and the enemies of the Third...
Finally, Plath calls her father a vampire who lies in his grave -- "There's a stake in your fat black heart" (line 76) with the villagers dancing on his grave. She then confesses "Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through" (line 80) which symbolizes metaphorically her hatred for her father and for the bastardization of the German people by Adolph Hitler and his Nazi ideologies.
Bibliography
Hunt, Douglas, ed. The Riverside Anthology of Literature. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin
Company, 1988: 1172-1174.
Johnson, Allan. The Life of Sylvia Plath. New York: Macmillan, 1956.
Luddington, Michael. The Poetry of Sylvia…
