Summary Of Sylvia Plath's Poem Daddy

The poem “Daddy” was written in 1962. Sylvia Plath discusses her love/hate for father and others using imagery from the Holocaust, Nazis, and vampires. The title of the poem suggests that it is loving and intimate, more so than if it were titled “Father”. That is where love is present. Hate and anger are present everywhere else in the poem. Sylvia Plath’s father died when she was eight years old due to complications of diabetes (Steinberg 2007). He is already dead; Sylvia Plath wrote this poem when she was 30, but in stanza 2 she says “Daddy, I have had to kill you. / You died before I had time—“(lines 6-7). What she is killing is the memories of him; he died too early and has caused a great amount of grief. This poem is angry, perhaps because he left her when he died while she was so young. Throughout the poem Sylvia Plath uses words like “achoo” and “gobbledygoo” giving the poem a childish feel, as it uses these themes of the Holocaust and vampires, adding a contrast. The poem also has an irregular rhyme scheme using the “oo” sound. There is no evidence from sources that Sylvia Plath’s father was ever abusive to her, so one can conclude that the loss was so immense, and caused so much pain, that it was like if she was being tormented.
There are images from the Holocaust throughout the
Sylvia Plath uses the lines 4-9 to compare herself to what they did. “A sort of walking miracle, my skin. / Bright as a Nazi lampshade, / My right foot / A paperweight, / My face a featureless, fine / Jew linen.” She compares her skin to one of their lampshades, and her foot to a paperweight. They reduced her to from a human to inanimate objects. These lines could also suggest that Sylvia Plath is upset with how misogynistic men objectify women. Comparing objectifying women to Nazis and the Holocaust, which were both perpetrated by men, brings out how cruel they can