Sylvia Plath – “Daddy” Published: October 12, 1962 (BBC broadcast); Ariel (1965 posthumous)

Structure & Form

Stanza: 5 lines (abab a rhyme echo)
Repetition: “You do not do,” “Daddy,” “Jew” — obsessive chant
Rhyme: Nursery-rhyme lilt (shoe/you/do) → childish terror
Meter: Loose iambic, accelerating into rage
Ending: Abrupt “I’m through” — phone slammed, spell broken

1. DADDYDADDY
References from Sylvia Plath’s poem

2. Holocaust imagery – why?
•Plath was a child during WWII and saw the rise and
fall of the Nazi party
•When her father died (1942), hatred for all things
German was at a peak in the USA
•Her high school history teacher put photos of
concentration camp inmates on the walls to disturb
his students’ complacency
•As an adult she followed the trials of Nazi war
criminals like Adolf Eichmann
•This interest is reflected in several other poems and
stories, e.g. her short story ‘Superman and Paula Brown’s new Snow Suit’ is
about a young girl’s loss of innocence during WWII, her poems ‘Lady Lazarus’,
‘Mary’s Song’ and ‘Fever 103’

3. An excerpt from
‘Superman and Paula Brown’s new snow suit’
“That same winter, war was declared and I
remember sitting by the radio with mother and
Uncle Frank…their voices were low and serious
and their talk was of planes and German bombs.
Uncle Frank said something about Germans in
America being put in prison for the duration and
Mother kept saying over and over, ‘I’m only glad
Otto didn’t live to see it come to this.”

4. “Ghastly Statue with one
grey toe
Big as a Frisco seal”
•The Colossus of Rhodes
was a 30 m high statue
of a Greek god Helios.
•In 1960 Plath published
the poem ‘The
Colossus’ which
imagines her father’s
dead body is the pieces
of the Colossus lying on
the hill side; his power
over her broken.

5. “A head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off the beautiful Nauset”
•Nauset is the coast in
Massachusetts where
Plath grew up
•Its sea is the Atlantic
ocean
“One grey toe
Big as a Frisco Seal”
A San Francisco Seal

6. “In the German tongue,
in the Polish town
scraped flat by the rollers
of wars, wars, wars.”
•Her father Otto Plath
emigrated to USA from
Grabow, Germany
•He spoke & taught
German
•Grabow was in the Polish
Corridor
Photos: Grabow today; American soldiers in
Grabow in 1945 after war’s end

7. “Chuffing me off like a Jew
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen”
•Trains taking Jews from
Warsaw to the camps
•The gates of Auschwitz
concentration camp in
Poland.

8. Concentration camps: Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen

9. “You stand at the
black board Daddy
In the picture I have of you”
This photo comes from Sylvia
Plath’s mother Aurelia. She
said of her husband in her
book Letters Home:
•“Otto’s superior education…our
former teacher student
relationship…led to an attitude
of “rightful” dominance on his
part…I realised that if I wanted
a peaceful home, I would
simply have to become more
submissive”
•“Otto did not take an active role
in tending to or playing with
the children, he loved them
dearly and took great pride in
their attractiveness and
progress”

10. “The snows of the Tyrol
The clear beer of Vienna
are not very pure or true”
•The Tirol is an alpine
mountain area in Austria
•Plath’s mother was of
Austrian descent and had
grown up speaking German

11. “my gypsy
ancestress…
and my Taroc
pack”
•Plath and Hughes were fascinated by
the occult
•In the evenings they would often play
with a a Ouja board and Tarot cards
Tarot card reading
has been popular in
Europe since 1500,
including Romania
In WWII Gypsies
(Roma people) were
also persecuted by
the Nazis and sent to
camps

12. “I have always been scared of you
With your Luftwaffe…”
•The Luftwaffe is the German
Air Force, which was the most
powerful in Europe in WWII

13. “And your neat moustache,
your Aryan eye bright blue.
Panzer man, Panzer man, O You’
•A Panzer was an
armoured tank
•The Panzer divisions
were crucial in helping
Germany successfully
invade other countries
in WWII

14. “I made a model of you…”
Plath said about this poem…
•The Electra complex ( theory from Freudian
psychology) that said women seek men who are
like their fathers and resent their mothers.
'The poem is 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 paralyse each other--
she has to act out the awful little
allegory before she is free of it.'

15. “The black telephone’s off at the root”
•Plath pulled the
phone cord out of the
wall when she
intercepted a call
from Assia Wevill to
Ted Hughes
•This incident is also
mentioned in such
poems as Plath’s
‘Words heard, by
accident, over the
phone’ , ‘The Fearful’
and Hughes's ‘Do Not
Pick Up the
Telephone.’
As well as alluding to this
incident, what else does this
metaphor convey?

16. An interesting Plath-like image…
The Epiphany

17. So – what do you think?
What is ‘Daddy’ about?
Which of these statements would you agree with? Give reasons.
Or – write your own!
1.‘Daddy’ is about how her father was as evil as Hitler.
2.‘Daddy’ is about Plath’s hatred of her husband Ted Hughes.
3.The poem is saying that Sylvia Plath’s suffering at the
hands of men is as bad as the Jews’ suffering during the
Holocaust.
4.The poem is about the suffering all women experience at
the hands of men.
5.The poem is about a daughter who both loves and hates
her father.
6.The poem is about a woman who suffered for her love of a
dominant father and husband and is trying to break free.

18. Is Daddy a good poem?
•IF YES … what makes it good?
•IF NO… what’s wrong with it?

19. Critics said…
•“Daddy is the ‘Guernica’ of Modern poetry”
•- George Steiner, critic
•“Despite everything, Daddy is a love poem” - A. Alvarez