“Daddy”: Sylvia Plath; poem and analysis

“Daddy”: Sylvia Plath; poem and analysis.

Daddy (Daddy) is a feminist poem by the American writer Sylvia Plath (1932-1963), written in 1962 and published posthumously in the 1965 anthology: Ariel (Ariel).

Daddyone of Sylvia Plath’s most recognized poems, and probably one of the most controversial modern poems, is a dark, surreal, and certainly painful allegory, which uses excessive metaphors—including Nazism and vampires—to express the mixture of feelings of a woman, a victim, who is finally free from her father.

In this context, Daddy by Sylvia Plath is a remarkable poem of empowerment, of liberation from parental commands.

Daddy.
Daddy, Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)

You don’t fit me anymore, you don’t fit me,
black shoe, never again.
In there I lived like a foot
For thirty-odd years, poor and white,
without daring to breathe.

Daddy, I had to finish you off.
You were dead before I had time,
Heavy as marble, full of God,
gloomy statue of a single brown hoof
Big as a San Francisco stamp.

A single head over the capricious Atlantic
Where green grains spill over the blue
Offshore beautiful Nauset.
I got used to praying for you to come back.

In the German language, in the Polish people,
Tattered, leveled by the steamroller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is not strange.
Says my Polish friend.

There are more than a dozen
So I can’t figure out where
You put the plant, your root,
I could never talk to you
My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth.

Got stuck in a barbed wire trap
Ich, ich, me, me.
I could barely speak,
I thought every German was you
And the obscene language

A machine, it was a machine
Insulting me like a Jew.
Another Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
As a Jew I began to speak
And I think how very Jewish I can be.

The snows of Tyrol, the beer of Vienna
They are not so pure or so authentic.
With my gypsy lineage and my strange luck
And my Tarot deck, my Tarot cards
I may very well be somewhat Jewish.

I’ve always had you
With your Luftwaffe, with your glugluglug,
And your trimmed mustache
And your Aryan eye, sky blue.
Panzer-man. Oh, you…

Not God, but a swastika
So black that no sky could hover.
Every woman loves a fascist,
the boot in the face, the brutal
brutal heart of a beast like you.

You’re standing on the board, daddy,
In the photograph I have of you,
A cleft on the chin
Instead of on your foot.
But no less a demon for that, no,
No less than the man in black.

That put a stop to my pretty and red heart
I was ten years old when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And I came back, I came back to you
I thought even my bones would come back too.

But they took me out of the bag
And they rebuilt me ​​with rubber.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you.
A man in black with a Meinkampf air.

Lover of torment and deformation
I said yes, I do.
So, daddy, I’m finally done.
The phone was uprooted,
The voices can’t eat away at me anymore.

I have killed one man, I have killed two
To the vampire who said he was you
And he drank my blood for a whole year,
Seven years if you want to know,
Daddy, you can rest in peace now.

There’s a stake in your black, crude heart,
The villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and tapping on you,
They always knew it was you;
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, you’re finished.

Gothic poems. I Poems by Sylvia Plath.

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