Daddy By Sylvia Plath

Of all the emotions, hatred is one of the most intense. It can manifest itself from simple notions such as skin tone, gender, or sexuality, but it can also stem from deep psychological traumas, which is present in Plath’s “Daddy”. Despite the complexity of hatred, some poets have managed to put pen to paper and come up with beautiful poems that effectively recreate the feeling of hatred in all their readers.
Sylvia Plath did not live a happy life. She mentions in her poem “Daddy” that she was ten years old when they buried her father and “at twenty I tried to die/ And get back, back, back to you” [Plath 954 lines 58-59]. She lived most of her adult life dealing with depression, and it’s evident from the poem that she blames it all on her father.
The poem begins with the speaker meeting with an ex and “[she] say[s] to the bitch inside [her], don’t start growling” [Kizer 948 line 2]. All throughout the poem, Kizer makes allusions to this “bitch” as it reacts in different ways to this ex-lover. At first, “the bitch starts to bark hysterically” [Kizer 948 line 6], but as the conversation moves along, the tone changes. The bitch, which represents the speaker’s inner self, begins to whimper and “wants to snuggle up to him, to cringe” [Kizer 949 line 12] which indicates that although the speaker hates this man, there is still a part of her that longs to be by his side again and be submissive. The speaker then goes on to scold the inner self for wanting to return, despite the lover being cold and distant, as evident when she writes “How she lay at his feet and looked up adoringly/ though he was absorbed in his paper;/ Or, bored with her devotion, ordered her to the kitchen/ Until he was ready to play” [Kizer 949 lines 20 – 23]. As the poem comes to a close, the speaker remains polite to the ex-lover while the “bitch” is forced away, signifying that the hatred still remains deep within the