Reflection on Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy”
Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy” is about a daughter’s reflection on her abusive father. Though the narrative Plath created is not one hundred percent true, she wrote with such poetic language that the reader could easily believe it to be nonfictional. To begin, structurally, the poem is fairly uniform. There are sixteen stanzas each with five lines. The structure almost reminds me of how song lyrics are laid out.
Throughout the poem, Plath uses rhyming, particularly with an “ooh” sound in the words “you”, “two”, “Achoo”, “Jew”, “true”, “screw”, “glue”, and more. There is no real set rhyme scheme, however. She also included German phrases that rhyme with these English words: “Ach, du” which is a German expression of disgust and happens to rhyme almost perfectly with “Achoo”. Her use of the Achoo onomatopoeia feels childlike or cartoonish and emphasizes the narrator’s innocence. Pairing that with the rest of the rhymes also extends that tone. Additionally, the use of the title “daddy”, as opposed to “father” or “dad”, may help the reader determine the narrator’s character. The word “daddy” implies that she is young or at least young at heart.
Another line that stands out is “no not / Any less the black man who / Bit my pretty red heart in two”. Calling her heart red conjures the thought that it is young and fresh, as in functioning and in good health and full of red blood, or tender and defenseless. With her youth comes vulnerability and defenselessness, and the poem is, at its core, about the narrator’s father taking advantage of that vulnerability. She later goes on to compare her father to a vampire who drank her blood for seven years: perhaps that is for how long the abuse went on. In the final stanza she states: “There’s a stake in your fat black heart / 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.” Historically vampires are only defeated with a stake through the heart, and with this knowledge, Plath carries on this metaphor through to the end. Her father’s death meant the end of the abuse and therefore the end of the poem. However, she may also grieve her father’s death despite what he put her through.
