Metaphor in Sylvia Plath\'s Daddy

¶ … METAPHOR in SYLVIA PLATH'S DADDY

In her 1965 poem Daddy, Sylvia Plath utilizes the poetic technique of metaphor extensively in order to demonstrate to the reader how she feels about her father as a perceived member of the Nazi Party. First of all, Plath mentions her father's "black shoe" (line 2) which symbolizes the familiar footwear worn by Nazis during World War II in Hitler's Germany. In lines 8-9, Plath calls her late father "Marble heavy, a bag full of God/Ghastly statue" which indicates her disgust with him as an overblown, iconic figure of marble, standing aloof and indifferent to the suffering of the Jews. In line 25, Plath mentions her tongue being stuck in her jaw and then equates this with "It stuck in a barb wire snare" (line 26) which symbolizes the barb wire of the death camps at Auchwitz and Dachau. Lines 31-32 refers to the freight trains which carried the Jews to the death camps ("An engine, an engine/Chuffing me off like a Jew"). Obviously, Plath sees herself as a Jew in a death camp where her father possibly held a position as a guard or some other authority figure. Plath then states that the "snows of the Tyrol, (i.e., the mountains) "the clear beer of Vienna (i.e., German beer), "are not very pure or true" (lines 36-37) which symbolizes her opinion that the Aryan nation and its men are not as pure as they seem to think nor very true to their sacred Nordic ancestry. 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 Reich. 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.