From this it follows that she herself lacks roots. The imagery quickly intensifies:. 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. This obscures the fact that if her father is German, she too is part German. Even the German language is obscene and has overwhelming power to the narrator. It takes on the power of an engine. But this is not any engine; it is the engine pulling its train-load of victims to the death camps. The poem returns to the autobiographical elements. After being brought back from death at twenty and prevented from uniting with her father, the narrator is again viciously angry.
Out of her need for a paternal figure and as a result of her unresolved issues because her father died when she was so young, she is now connected to a new man who is just like him. Daddy, I have And a head Ach, du. In the German So I never I could hardly Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen. I began to She casts herself as a victim and him as several figures, including a Nazi, vampire, devil, and finally, as a resurrected figure her husband, whom she has also had to kill.
Though the final lines have a triumphant tone, it is unclear whether she means she has gotten "through" to him in terms of communication, or whether she is "through" thinking about him. Plath explained the poem briefly in a BBC interview:. The poem is spoken by a girl with an Electra complex. The 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 other words, contradiction is at the heart of the poem's meaning. Neither its triumph nor its horror is to be taken as the sum total of her intention. Instead, each element is contradicted by its opposite, which explains how it shoulders so many distinct interpretations. This sense of contradiction is also apparent in the poem's rhyme scheme and organization.
It uses a sort of nursery rhyme, singsong way of speaking. There are hard sounds, short lines, and repeated rhymes as in "Jew," "through," "do," and "you". This establishes and reinforces her status as a childish figure in relation to her authoritative father.
This relationship is also clear in the name she uses for him - "Daddy"- and in her use of "oo" sounds and a childish cadence. However, this childish rhythm also has an ironic, sinister feel, since the chant-like, primitive quality can feel almost like a curse. One critic wrote that the poem's "simplistic, insistent rhythm is one form of control, the obsessive rhyming and repeated short phrases are others, means by which she attempts to charm and hold off evil spirits.
Plath weaves together patriarchal figures — a father, Nazis, a vampire, a husband — and then holds them all accountable for history's horrors. Like "The Colossus ," "Daddy" imagines a larger-than-life patriarchal figure, but here the figure has a distinctly social, political aspect. Even the vampire is discussed in terms of its tyrannical sway over a village. In this interpretation, the speaker comes to understand that she must kill the father figure in order to break free of the limitations that it places upon her.
In particular, these limitations can be understood as patriarchal forces that enforce a strict gender structure. The girl creates a model a voodoo-like doll? This replica strongly resembles Plath's husband, Ted Hughes. He has a Meinkampf look Mein Kampf is the title of Adolf Hitler's book, which means my struggle and is not averse to torture.
The speaker addresses daddy again, for the last time. There'll be no more communication, no voices from the past. Note the emphasis on "black" again. This telephone belongs to the father.
Stanza The penultimate five lines. The speaker has achieved her double killing, both father and husband have been dispatched. The latter is referred to as a vampire who has been drinking her blood for seven years. It's as if the narrator is reassuring her father that all is well now. He can lie back in readiness. For what? Stanza The father's fat black heart is pierced by a wooden stake, just like a vampire, and the villagers are thoroughly happy about it. A bit of a bizarre image to end on.
But, just who are the villagers? Are they the inhabitants of a village in the allegory, or are they a collective of Sylvia Plath's imagination?
Either way, the father's demise has them dancing and stamping on him in an almost jovial way. To put the lid on things, the girl declares daddy a bastard.
The exorcism is over, the conflict resolved. Lines You do not do, you do not do Any more, black shoe In which I have lived like a foot For thirty years, poor and white, Barely daring to breathe or Achoo. The speaker says after 30 years, she will no longer live trapped inside the memory of her father. Her comparison of him to a shoe evokes the old nursery rhyme about an old woman who lives in a shoe, and the singsong repetition and the word "achoo" sounds similarly childish.
The "you" to whom the poem is addressed is the absent father. Lines Daddy, I have had to kill you. In line 6, the speaker shocks us with the assertion she has already murdered her father—figuratively. A "bag full of God" could mean he's in a body bag or that his body is just a bag.
We get an image of how big he is in her eyes via the heavy, cold corpse so large that it spans the US, his toes in the San Francisco Bay Lines And a head in the freakish Atlantic Where it pours bean green over blue In the waters off beautiful Nauset. She used to pray to "recover" him and she could mean that she wished she could have him back or heal him. This German expression is a sigh of angry? Lines In the German tongue, in the Polish town Scraped flat by the roller Of wars, wars, wars.
The repetition of "wars" gives us the sense that there have been many and of landscapes being repetitively flattened by war. Lines Says there are a dozen or two. This part could mean that the speaker doesn't know precisely where her father came from "put your foot, your root" , and that she had no rapport with him.
Lines It stuck in a barb wire snare. Trying to talk to her father was dangerous and painful, like sticking your tongue in a trap. Is she scared or nervous or? Lines An engine, an engine Chuffing me off like a Jew. Trying to speak German makes her feel like she's trapped on a train, headed towards a death camp: We see the speaker's mental and emotional conversion here and how she associates her fear and terror of her father with the struggle of the Jewish people against the Nazis.
Lines The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna Are not very pure or true. In these lines we join the speaker on that train winding through Europe. The white snow and the clear beer contrast starkly to the dark deeds being inflicted by Nazis in the name of racial purity.
The speaker is consciously, deliberately choosing sides. Lines I have always been scared of you, With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo. She calls herself a Jew and her father a Nazi killer.
A Panzer-man is one who drives a tank. Lines Not God but a swastika So black no sky could squeak through. His Nazism blocks the sun, it's so huge. Why do women love Fascists? Is it bitter sarcasm or truth? Perhaps she's saying that in relationships, women are dominated by men. In order to love a man you must be masochistic. Lines 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.
Now, she's calling her father a devil. The speaker describes a photo of her father. BTW, Plath's father was a biology professor see photo below. Lines Bit my pretty red heart in two. He broke her heart. He died when she was 10 and she tried to commit suicide at 20 to get "back, back, back" like earlier, when she tried to "recover" him. The repetition here emphasizes her futile desperation.
Lines But they pulled me out of the sack, And they stuck me together with glue.
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