Daddy by Sylvia Plath: An Explication
At first glance, Sylvia Plath's "Daddy" seems like the ranting of an adolescent breaking away from an oppressive parent.
In fact, on one level, this poem is a poetic tirade directed at a father who is the source of considerable pain, but Plath has loftier goals than adolescent angst for this poem. The narrator in "Daddy" is actually a 30-year-old woman and presumably the voice of Sylvia Plath. This poem, like much of Plath's poetry, is autobiographical. In fact, Ariel,1 the collection that includes "Daddy," is an autobiographical collection of poetry that describes Plath's life leading up to her suicide. In "Daddy" she attempts to connect the intensely personal suffering of a woman (Plath) who never recovered from the death of her father to a more universal suffering, whether it's between father and daughter, husband and wife or tyrant and captive.
The poem opens with the narrator addressing her father:
You do not do, you do not do
Anymore black shoe,
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo (Muller 320).
Plath is expressing a near hysterical need to extricate herself from her father's suffocating grip, a vice she has been held in for her entire life. Indeed, the only way she can sever her tie to her father is to recognize what he actually was to her (a brute and a tyrant) and to figuratively kill him. "Daddy, I have had to kill you. You died before I had time" (Muller 320).
By the third stanza the poem shifts from the very personal conflict of a tormented...
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