Daddy by Sylvia Plath Sylvia

Daddy by Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath's Daddy is a deeply personal account of coming to terms with the loss of a parent, i.e. her father, but beyond that, the poem is a reflection of the paternal symbol and its implication in Plath's life. The thesis of this paper is to illustrate that Sylvia Plath's poem, Daddy, strives at personal healing through literary imagery. Using profound and beautifully crafter imagery, the poem Daddy becomes much more than a mere account of a true-life situation, it transforms into a demonstration of the power of the human mind when confronted with its own grief, as well as its efforts to control the reason behind this intense personal suffering. There is a certain feeling of fluidity throughout the poem; the images appeared to be easily transformed, enhanced, reduced, they seem ever changing as an attempt to convey deep meanings related to themes such as personal loss, grief and self-discovery. Phrases are short, and the rhythm is rather simplistic but very insistent bordering on obsessive, becoming a kind of reflection of the inner trials and tribulations of the author (Uroff). A good example of fluid images can be found in the very beginning of the poem, when she imagines herself as a prisoner trapped just like a foot, inside her father's shoe: "You do not do, you do not do / Any more, black shoe / in which I have lived like a foot." The image slowly flows into another, which presents her father in her role, i.e."one grey toe / Big as a Frisco seal." Moreover, throughout the poem her father takes different shapes such as statue, shoe, Nazi, teacher, devil, and vampire - images which help her ritual of exorcism.

Although she starts her childhood recollection from the level of a child, i.e. with nursery rhymes - the tale of the old lady in the shoe, she moves on to making historical references that represent an opportunity to deepen and further elaborate on her rebellion against the memory of her father. In this sense, she uses images of Jews being taken off to "Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen" during World War II and a mixture of German and English "I never could talk to you. / the tongue stuck in my jaw. It stuck in a barb wire snare. / Ich, ich, ich, ich." Her childish perspective is perhaps the most disturbing because she recalls the feeling of fear and impotence which she experienced in the presence of her father, who passed away when she was only 7 years old (Stevenson). The childhood terror and intimidation caused by the paternal image is illustrated by her association with Nazi persecution of Jews. The rejection of her brutal and life-denying father is opposed to her love and admiration for him: "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."

The tone of the poem is another important element in the overall lyrical body; it is based on constructing a voice that changes throughout the poem from unpleasant and rebellious to proud to murderous. These shifts in tone generate shift in the general mood of the poem in the sense that she manages to recover long lost feelings of resentment and pain from her childhood and to express them in the context of her state of mind when writing the poem, i.e. during adulthood. It is also relevant to note that the poem was finished at a time of great inner struggle - just months before she committed suicide, which could account for the insistent rhymes and desire to reconstruct her dark painful childhood (Uroff).