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, Im 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 fathers 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 Plaths father was not in
the military, Otto Plath was actually a professor of biology at Boston University and a wellrespected authority on bees (www.notablebiographies.com, 2014). Sylvia Plaths 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 Plaths 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 Plaths 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 fathers 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 fathers death unsuccessfully. In the twelfth stanza Plath
describes how she tried to cut herself loose from the burdens her fathers 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 Plaths 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 ones 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 Plaths other writings. Her melancholy existence shadowed by her
attempt to overcome her depression is made clear in this poem. Sylvia Plaths 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/PePu/Plath-Sylvia.html

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