Poem "daddy"

The focus of this paper is to exam the poem “Daddy” by Sylvia Plath and its autobiographical foundations as not every event of this poem actually happened. Ambiguities are present when the speaker expresses both fervent love and severe hatred for her father. The love for her father comes from seeing her father as a God when she was a child (line 8) and the hatred from his uncompromising austerity (Lines 1-5).

The poem touches upon such subjects as unadulterated rage toward male dominance to using Holocaust imagery in her depiction of her relationship with her father. There are many paradoxes throughout the poem, which causes the reader to question the objective of the poem, if literal meaning is given to the poem, the autobiographical reality would be that her father would have been a German Nazi and the speaker part German and part Jewish who has been demoralized by her father. This begs the question, if her father was not a Nazi then why would she create this image of him? Since her father did in fact die when she was eight years old, the only images she has are from her childhood while she still thought of him as a god and therefore the perspectives she portrays are childlike images that she sustained during her lifetime. Naivety is also shown in the poems rhyme scheme and organization, the rhyming she uses such as “Jew”, “through”, “do”, and “you” seem childlike in their usage. Which support the childlike figure that she comes across as when discussing her “daddy” which is also a childlike term as well. On the other hand, her childish rhyming sequences somehow have an ironic sinister feel a chant-like rhythm that almost feels like she’s casting a spell. Another view that was expressed in the poem “Daddy” was that of an individual trapped amid society and her feelings about herself. It’s almost an interwoven tale of patriarchal figures-her father, Nazis, vampires, and a husband-and somehow she is able to hold them all responsible for the horrible things that have happened in history as well as herself.

Considered by some as Plath’s best known poem, “Daddy” has been analyzed and brought about a variety of reactions, understandably so because of its ability to discuss feminist rage at one point then changing to unadulterated rage toward male dominance. Her usage of Holocaust imagery in the lines “Chuffing me off like a Jew, A Jew to