Daddy Lyrics
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.
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.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.
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.
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
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.
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.
About
The poem is an extraordinary achievement, loaded with anger and brutal language and repetition of emphatic ideas. Despite many misinterpret her symbolic language as confessional poetry about Sylvia’s relationship with her father, Andrew Wilson, Plath’s biographer, has asserted that Sylvia actually had a ‘great relationship with her father’.
In The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath, biographer Ronald Hayman suggests that she had actually worshipped her father when she was a little girl, doting on his praise. A hard-working, studious blacksmith’s son who immigrated to America as a teenager and forged an academic career teaching German and biology, Otto Plath was not a Nazi.
Plath, a forerunner of Second Wave Feminism that developed in the 1960s believed the discrimination of women at the hands of men in the middle of the 20th century was similar to the oppression the Jews faced against the Nazis. This can be seen in how Plath expresses sympathy and identification with Jews and their suffering. A famous Jewish comparative literature professor at Yale, Harold Bloom, was notoriously offended by Plath’s use of the Holocaust as a literary metaphor. Others, such as Seamus Heaney, have criticized her ‘gratuitous’ references to the Holocaust in his wake:
A poem like ‘Daddy’, however, brilliant a tour de force …however its violence and vindictiveness can be understood or excused in light of the poet’s parental and marital relations … nevertheless … rampages so permissively in the history of other people’s sorrows that it simply withdraws its rights to our sympathy.
Otto Plath died of untreated gangrene caused by diabetes when Plath was eight years old. She was never, therefore, able to resolve her feelings or come to terms with their problematic relationship. Some have applied a Freudian interpretation of this poem, analysing it in terms of an ‘Electra Complex’. Whatever analyses one applies the poem can be read in terms of Plath’s desire to come to terms with her feelings about her father.
In an introduction written for a BBC broadcast of the poem in 1962, Plath described the poem as follows:
Here is a poem spoken by a girl with an Electra complex. Her father died while she thought he was God. Her case is complicated by the fact that her father was also a Nazi and her mother very possibly part Jewish. In the daughter the two strains marry and paralyze each other – she has to act out the awful little allegory once over before she is free of it.
In this same broadcast, she giggles at the end of the poem when the narrator’s “father” ultimately dies. Given that the father in this poem represents the oppressive societal structure women like Plath sought to overcome.
Structure
The poem comprises sixteen five-lined stanzas known as quintains. It has no regular rhyme scheme, although double ‘oo’ vowels, as in ‘you’, ‘through’, ‘Jew’, ‘do’, ‘blue’ appear at the end of many of the lines. This creates an almost childish, nursery-rhyme repetition.
Language and Imagery
Plath uses, as Seamus Heaney puts it, imagery of ‘violence and vindictiveness’. There are multiple references to Naziism and all the related imagery — swantikas, ‘panzer-man’, concentration camp names, barbed wire, ‘Mein Kampf’ etc. There is imagery that we find also in her other poems — a foot, blood, a black telephone. Characteristically, images begun in the early stanzas can be picked up later in the poem, giving a sense of unity and emphasis.
“Daddy” was published posthumously in Plath’s 1965 collection, Ariel.
See Sylvia Plath: A Critical Study, Time Kendall, Faber and Faber
Q&A
Find answers to frequently asked questions about the song and explore its deeper meaning
There are eighty lines in total; sixteen stanzas, each made up of five lines.
- 1.Morning Song
- 2.The Couriers
- 3.Sheep in Fog
- 5.Lady Lazarus
- 6.Tulips
- 7.Cut
- 8.Elm
- 11.Berck-Plage
- 12.Ariel
- 13.Death & Co.
- 14.Lesbos
- 16.Gulliver
- 17.Getting There
- 18.Medusa
- 21.Mary’s Song
- 23.The Rival
- 24.Daddy
- 25.You’re
- 26.Fever 103°
- 27.The Bee Meeting
- 29.Stings
- 30.The Swarm
- 31.Wintering
- 32.The Hanging Man
- 33.Little Fugue
- 34.Years
- 36.Totem
- 37.Paralytic
- 38.Balloons
- 39.Poppies in July
- 40.Kindness
- 41.Contusion
- 42.Edge
- 43.Words