“Daddy”

Sylvia Plath’s poem Daddy was quite confusing for me. I had mixed feelings throughout on whether or not she loved or hated her father. Plath makes a reference about being scared of him in line 5 “Barely daring to breathe or achoo”, and then says outright in line 41“I was always sacred of you”. However, then Plath writes “At twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back to you”, and seemed to be remorseful when she wrote about being ten and watching her father being buried. But Plath ends her poem with “you bastard, I’m through”. I understand that her relationship with her father was strained in some way, but beyond that I couldn’t tell her actual feelings for him.

I thought the criticism by George Steiner would clear the poem up for me, but it didn’t help. To the best of Steiner’s knowledge, Plath was in no way involved with concentration camps, yet she is able to write about it so graphically. Her father was of German decent, and I kind of felt like she was accusing him of being a Nazi, or blaming him for the War in some of her lines (line 29: I thought every German was you), even though her family lived in Massachusetts at the time. The connections she makes throughout the poem with her and her father’s relationship and the War seem farfetched to me, and then finding out that she was no where near a concentration camp made it even more confusing. I think if I knew more about her life and her relationship with her father, this poem may make more sense to me.