| 
  • If you are citizen of an European Union member nation, you may not use this service unless you are at least 16 years old.

  • You already know Dokkio is an AI-powered assistant to organize & manage your digital files & messages. Very soon, Dokkio will support Outlook as well as One Drive. Check it out today!

View
 

Daddy

This version was saved 15 years, 3 months ago View current version     Page history
Saved by Jonah Queen
on December 4, 2008 at 9:01:28 pm
 
You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe[1]
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo[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

And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.[3]
The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene

An engine, an engine
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.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You-- 

Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not 
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
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.
So daddy, I'm finally through.
The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through.

If I've killed one man, I've killed two--
The vampire who said he was you[4]
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.

Footnotes

  1. The black shoe serves as a metaphor for Plath's father. Typically, when you think of a shoe, you think of warmth and protection. Though, given the black color of this shoe, it seems we are forced to visualize death..or a coffin maybe. So, Plath's father served as her protector but also her smotherer.
  2. The major rhyme is identified in the first stanza, with ''do,'' ''shoe,'' and ''Achoo.'' However, continuing throughout the poem, the ''oo'' sound is very irregular and inconsistent, appearing throughout the overall poem, but not everywhere. This irregularity correlates to the relationship between Plath and her father. It helps strengthen the fact that Plath lived without her father for most of her life. There were times of happiness, and then periods of extreme depression in her life. The varied rhyme scheme mirrors the ups and downs of her life and her intense conflicting relationship with her father.
  3. This stanza expresses the speaker's feelings of exasperation towards the search for her dad. The lack of communication and connection between them may be the reason why she "lived like a foot" in the "black shoe" feeling entrapped for thirty years in ignorancy. Because she does not know the true identity of her dad, she creates an imaginary persona of him that contrasts greatly from her own. This is apparent when she identifies her dad as a "German" while herself as a "Jew" further implying the great amount of torment he brings to her life.
  4. Here Plath switches from comparing her father to a metaphorical monster (a Nazi) to a literal monster (a vampire). It further emphasizes the hateful tone of the poem and shifts the her anger from her father's German heritage to his own actions.

Comments (0)

You don't have permission to comment on this page.