Sometimes when reading a poet, especially an author who writes in a confessional or autobiographical style, it is helpful to know a bit about his or her biography. There are some benefits to reading these kinds of authors through the lens of their past. In the case of Sylvia Plath, she had an obsession with her father, Otto Plath, and his untimely death when she was eight years old. The poem "Daddy," echoes some of...
Sometimes when reading a poet, especially an author who writes in a confessional or autobiographical style, it is helpful to know a bit about his or her biography. There are some benefits to reading these kinds of authors through the lens of their past. In the case of Sylvia Plath, she had an obsession with her father, Otto Plath, and his untimely death when she was eight years old. The poem "Daddy," echoes some of Plath's mixed feelings about her father, which sets a tone of ambivalence regarding her relationship with him.
The first stanza relays Sylvia's desire to rid herself of the weight of her father's memory, a weight that has held her captive her entire life. The prominent metaphor of a black shoe is likely a reference to her father's foot infection from untreated diabetes, which turned gangrenous and resulted in amputation. In the second stanza the lines, "Daddy, I have had to kill you./ You died before I had time--" along with the idea of amputation present in the first stanza, convey that she feels the need to separate herself abruptly from her father and his memory. Yet in the third stanza after a mention of Nauset (a fond reference to her childhood home near the sea), she claims "I used to pray to recover you," which shows that she has dubious feelings about completing the mental severance of their relationship.
Stanza twelve has a reference to her (nearly successful) suicide attempt when she was twenty, calling it an attempt to get back to her father, even if only his bones. The poem has increasingly desperate language that compares Otto to Adolf Hitler and Sylvia to a Jew, and articulates Sylvia's belief that she married Ted Hughes because Hughes reminded her of her father. The final stanza illustrates with vague pronoun usage that she may have really confounded her relationship with her husband with her relationship with her father. In spite of having a passionate love for both of these men, she finishes the poem with "Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through." Love and mixed feelings are not enough, and Sylvia Plath must sever ties with them both.
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