Analysis of Daddy by Sylvia Plath

Analysis of Daddy by Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath uses her poem, Daddy, to express deep emotions toward her father’s life and death. With passionate articulation, she verbally turns over her feelings of rage, abandonment, confusion and grief. Though this work is fraught with ambiguity, a reader can infer Plath’s basic story. Her father was apparently a Nazi soldier killed in World War II while she was young. Her statements about not knowing even remotely where he was while he was in battle, the only photograph she has left of him and how she chose to marry a man that reminded her of him elude to her grief in losing her father and missing his presence. She also expresses a dark anger toward him for his political views and actions in such passages as: “Not God but a swastika / so black no sky could squeak through” and “…the brute / Brute heart of a brute like you.” She goes on talk about how her poor or non-existent relationship with her father caused her to enter an unhealthy relationship. Finally, she conveys a mood of overcoming this man’s dark hold on her. She is still filled with unhealthy rage toward him but in her repeating that she is “through” and discussing having killed someone she demonstrates her feelings of self-empowerment.

As Plath is using this poem as her personal forum to release her emotions, she also provides her audience with a look of her artistic style. She creates a poem that will enthrall the reader using mediums like vague material such as stanza two (2):

“Daddy, I have had to kill you.

You died before I had time-

Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,

Ghastly statue with one gray toe

Big as a Frisco seal.”

She also uses quite a bit of repetition to emphasize her points. A repeated word tend...

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“If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two-

The vampire who said he was you

And drank my blood for a year.”

This passage eludes that she may or may not have actually killed her husband and in doing so conquered her father in a sense. Nevertheless, it demonstrates her dark perspective of her marriage in describing her husband as a vampire that continually tortured her.

Plath’s work in the poem is undoubtedly bold and expressive. She uses a passion that makes her point clear even though her language may not necessarily be so obvious. She allows her readers to ride the roller coaster of battling her emotions with a freedom that suggests the piece was written for strictly personal expression; never to be read by others. The majority of the poem may certainly even be open for a variance of interpretations providing for a truly interesting work.