Closing Reading Of A Poem

Carlita Ward

Eng/125

July 6 2015

Heather Carlopio

My Interpretation of "Daddy" by Sylvia Plath

“Daddy” by Sylvia Plath is a dark and solemn journey through the thoughts of a young

girl scorned. This young girl becomes the woman who continues to carry the burden of her

childhood in her adult life. The setting and feeling of the poem is dismal and full of rage, a rage

Sylvia Plath claims to put behind her in the last line “ / Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through. /

“(Plath, 1963) but in reality she was never capable of escaping the pain. The poem “Daddy” if

the wording is taken literally as opposed to figuratively and or symbolically, the leads the reader

to believe that Sylvia Plath was raised in a military family by an oppressive father who brought

his work home with him. The poem entails so much more than what is on the surface, there is a

darkness buried deep within the words left for the reader to unearth by searching beyond the

words and into the soul of the poet.

“Daddy” is engorged with metaphoric references to a dark and oppressive past where

Plath equates her father’s hand to that of a Nazi. The reader can be eluded to believe in the third

stanza that Plath is describing the uniform of a soldier. ” / And a head in the freakish Atlantic. /

Where it pours bean green over blue. / “(Plath, 1963). In reality Sylvia Plath’s father was not in

the military, Otto Plath was actually “a professor of biology at Boston University and a well-

respected authority on bees” (www.notablebiographies.com, 2014). Sylvia Plath’s father passed

away when she was just eight years of age and through the poem “Daddy” one can feel her anger

and resentment toward his strict hand in life, as well as the fear and resentment toward his loss so

early in her young life. The poem gives the idea that Plath expresses the desire to omit the dark

memory of her father, a father she resented her entire short life. There seems to have been many

negative impacts on Plath’s life because she could never tell how father how she truly felt and a

lot of this negative impact evolved from his death. Plath attempts to replace her father with the

image of a Nazi as she feels as if he has left her alone to suffer the cruelties of the world. This

can be seen in the seventh stanza which reads “/ Chuffing me off like a Jew. / A Jew to Dachau,

Auschwitz, Belsen. / I began to talk like a Jew. / I think I may well be a Jew. / “(Plath, 1963).

She feels alone and scared, unsure of what the future holds or how to properly deal with it.

Sylvia Plath's writing suggests that she felt as if she was left alone to suffer a never ending

oppression.

The meter of the poem can be compared to those found in many nursery rhymes. It is as

if Plath’s intent was to portray a childlike innocence in the wake of her despair The pain she felt

was one carried form her childhood, the voice of the poem begins as that of a young child. This

voice seems to mature into that of an adult as the poem carries on, expressing thoughts of despair

and grim detail. Sylvia Plath carried the pain of her father’s death from the moment it happened

at eight years of age until she was an adult. The Poem is full of metaphor and symbols, she lived

her life trying to fill the void left by her father’s death unsuccessfully. In the twelfth stanza Plath

describes how she tried to cut herself loose from the burdens her father’s death place upon her

life. “/ Daddy, I have had to kill you. / You died before I had time. / “(Plath, 1963). Plath is

alluding to the unhealthy burden she carried through life with the memory of her father, and the

extent to which her father's loss affected her is painfully obvious.

She later goes on to speak of her husband in this poem, yet another replacement for her

father who only brought more pain than comfort as he was unfaithful to her and left her for

another woman. Once again the man she loved failed to reciprocate the affection in the manner

Plath longed for. In the last two lines of the thirteenth stanza and the first two of the fourteenth,

Plath refers to her husband Ted Hughes, the poem reads,”/ I made a model of you. / A man in

black with a Meinkampf look. / And a love of the rack and the screw. / And I said I do, I do. /

“(Plath, 1963). These lines display what many refer to as Plath’s suffering from what is known in

psychology as the Electra complex. The Electra complex “describes what is most easily

explained as the female equivalent of the Oedipus Complex in which a daughter comes to view

her father as the first sexual attraction in her life and then proceeds to repress those feelings only

to have them subconsciously bubble to the surface in the form of falling in love with a man who

reminds her of her father” (voices.yahoo.com, 2014). Plath attempts to replace her father with

Ted Hughes and he ends the relationship abruptly and painfully just as her father did.

Sylvia Plath was a brilliant artist who was only recognized for her talents after her untimely

death. She yearned for answers throughout her life and attempted to fill the void of the loss of

her father at a young age. She suffered painful bouts of depresses ion left unresolved but

portrayed in her writing. The Poem “Daddy” is dismal and gray it comes from a very desolate

and gloomy place. Life can be painfully cruel and if left unanswered the dark points in one’s life

can linger on with a tremendously negative effect. The pain and despair can be felt by the reader

in this poem and many of Plath’s other writings. Her melancholy existence shadowed by her

attempt to overcome her depression is made clear in this poem. Sylvia Plath’s ex-husband Ted

Hughes “published three volumes of her work posthumously, including The Collected Poems,

which was the recipient of the 1982 Pulitzer Prize, she was the first poet to win a Pulitzer Prize

after death” (www.poets.org, 1997-2014). Her life which was so painfully displayed in her

writing resulted in the poem “Daddy” this poem was one of many included in “The Collected

Poems.

References

www.notablebiographies.com. (2014). Retrieved from http://www.notablebiographies.com/Pe-

Pu/Plath-Sylvia.html

www.voices.yahoo.com. (2014). Retrieved from http://voices.yahoo.com/my-two-dads-sylvia-

plath-electra-complex-445005.html

www.poets.org. (1997-2014). Retrieved from http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/11

Plath, S. (1963). Ariel. New York, NY: Harper Collins.