Daddy - Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932, 
in Boston, Massachusetts. Her mother, Aurelia Schober, 
was a master’s student at Boston University when she met 
Plath’s father, Otto Plath, who was her professor.

They were married in January of 1932. Otto taught both German 
and biology, with a focus on apiology, the study of bees.

In 1940, when Plath was eight years old, her father died as a result 
of complications from diabetes. He had been a strict father, 
and both his authoritarian attitudes and his death drastically defined 
her relationships and her poems—most notably in her elegaic and 
infamous poem "Daddy."

Even in her youth, Plath was ambitiously driven to succeed. 
She kept a journal from the age of eleven and published her poems 
in regional magazines and newspapers. Her first national publication 
was in the Christian Science Monitor in 1950, just after graduating 
from high school.

In 1950, Plath matriculated at Smith College. 
She was an exceptional student, and despite a deep depression she 
went through in 1953 and a subsequent suicide attempt, she managed 
to graduate summa cum laude in 1955.

After graduation, Plath moved to Cambridge, England, on a Fulbright Scholarship. In early 1956, she attended a party and met the English 
poet Ted Hughes. Shortly thereafter, Plath and Hughes were married, 
on June 16, 1956.

Plath returned to Massachusetts in 1957 and began studying 
with Robert Lowell. Her first collection of poems, Colossus, 
was published in 1960 in England, and two years later in the 
United States. She returned to England, where she gave birth 
to her children Frieda and Nicholas, in 1960 and 1962, respectively.

In 1962, Ted Hughes left Plath for Assia Gutmann Wevill. 
That winter, in a deep depression, Plath wrote most of the poems 
that would comprise her most famous book, Ariel.

In 1963, Plath published a semi-autobiographical novel, 
The Bell Jar, under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. 
Then, on February 11, 1963, during one of the worst English winters 
on record, Plath wrote a note to her downstairs neighbor instructing 
him to call the doctor, then she committed suicide using her gas oven.

Plath’s poetry is often associated with the Confessional movement, 
and compared to the work of poets such as Lowell and fellow student 
Anne Sexton. Often, her work is singled out for the intense coupling 
of its violent or disturbed imagery and its playful use of alliteration 
and rhyme.

Although only Colossus was published while she was alive, 
Plath was a prolific poet, and in addition to Ariel, Hughes published 
three other volumes of her work posthumously, including 
The Collected Poems, which was the recipient of the 1982 Pulitzer Prize. 
She was the first poet to posthumously win a Pulitzer Prize.

https://www.poets.org/

Daddy

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.

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.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.
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.

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

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.

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.

12 October 1962

https://www.poets.org/