Daddy by Sylvia Plath

Daddy by Sylvia Plath is one of the works that we discussed in class that I thought was very intriguing. It reveals to us the nature of the person’s relationship with her father as well as the impact that her father's death had on her. Plath pours her emotions as she feels abandoned by her father after his death. It starts as a deceptively simple strange nursery rhyme than an angry depiction of the speaker’s father. The language is relatively free from the kind of ominous and dark imagery and terms that will arrive as the poem progresses. The mood and tone of the poem Daddy reflects the anxiety that was common during the Cold War. The feeling of abandonment and loneliness is reflected in the context in which she was writing as a character of someone at that time that started to doubt the existence of God and thought they were all alone in the universe and thus their existence had no meaning. Her suffering is further reinforced by the allusions to the Nazi concentration camps. The image of the poem helps the reader to relate to Plath’s harsh life. An example of this is when the devil is introduced with “A cleft in your chin instead of your foot/But no less a devil for that”. (53-54). Again there is the reference to the foot, this one being suspicious just like the origins of the father. The cleft in the foot, the devil’s hooves, is compared to the cleft in the father’s chin. This is developed further with the images of the father and the husband who is like the father being a “vampire” (72)—a bloodsucking zombie who still haunts her long after his death. Likewise, Plath describes how her life was being drained away as the result of a marriage, similar to that of how a vampire drinks the blood of its victims; If I've killed one man, I've killed two--/The vampire who said he was you/And drank my blood for a year,/ Seven years, if you want to know’- the man had emotionally drained her. It is obvious that she has struggled very much with the emotions felt towards her father.