Daddy Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath · Leaving Cert Poetry

A daughter tries to break free of a father who has been dead since she was a child. The result is one of the most violent, rhythmically driven poems on the course, and you have to read its anger carefully rather than literally.

Context

Plath wrote “Daddy” in October 1962, weeks after her marriage to Ted Hughes broke down, and it appeared in Ariel in 1965 after her death. Plath’s own father, Otto Plath, died when she was eight, and the poem draws on that loss, but you must not treat the poem as straight autobiography. Plath described the speaker as a girl with an “Electra complex” whose father died while she thought he was God, and who has to act out a terrible little allegory to free herself. The “you” of the poem is part real father, part husband, part the whole weight of male authority.

For Paper 2 this is prescribed poetry. The likely angle is the intensity and disturbing power of Plath’s voice, or her use of sound and rhythm. A high-grade answer keeps reminding the examiner that this is a constructed, performed rage, not a diary entry, and shows how Plath builds it.

Key Moments

The opening rejects the father in the cadence of a nursery rhyme, which is the first sign that the poem will weaponise childishness.

“You do not do, you do not do / Any more, black shoe”Daddy, ll.1-2

The childlike “oo” sound, repeated like a chant, runs through the whole poem and makes it feel both infantile and incantatory. Midway, the speaker confesses she has never been able to speak to him, her language jamming up.

“I never could talk to you. / The tongue stuck in my jaw.”Daddy, ll.24-25

The final image is the act of exorcism, the community driving a stake through the father turned vampire.

“Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.”Daddy, final line

Key Themes

The central theme is the struggle to break free of a dominating father and of male power generally: the husband appears as “the vampire who said he was you”, folding two men into one oppressor. Tied to this is the theme of language and silence, the daughter who cannot speak, whose German father’s tongue becomes “an engine” carrying her off. The most contested theme is Plath’s use of Holocaust imagery: she casts the father as a Nazi and herself as a Jew “chuffing me off like a Jew” to dramatise the scale of her oppression. Treat this with restraint in an answer, naming it as a deliberate and divisive strategy: some readers find it gives the private feeling enormous force, others feel it borrows a suffering that is not the speaker’s to claim. Finally there is the theme of release: the poem ends in a violent, ambiguous freedom.

Literary Devices

The driving device is sound. The hammering “oo” rhyme (“do”, “shoe”, “you”, “Jew”, “through”) gives the poem a relentless, chant-like rhythm that mimics a spell or a tantrum. Repetition does heavy work, especially the doubled “Daddy, daddy” and the German “Ich, ich, ich, ich”. The controlling metaphors are political and gothic: the father as Nazi, the speaker as victim, and then the father as a vampire who must be killed a second time.

“There’s a stake in your fat black heart / And the villagers never liked you.”Daddy, ll.76-77

The allusions to history are designed to shock, and the simple, hard monosyllables (“black shoe”, “fat black heart”) keep the language brutal. Notice how the nursery-rhyme music sits against horrific content, and that clash is the whole effect.

Mood

The mood swings from grief to fury. It begins almost playful and trapped, then accelerates into rage, and ends somewhere between triumph and exhaustion. “I’m through” can mean finished with him, or finished altogether, and you should hold both readings open. There is something hysterical and almost out of control in the surface of the poem, but Plath keeps the rhythm tight, so the loss of control is itself performed.

Conclusion

“Daddy” is shocking on purpose. The skill to show in an answer is the gap between how raw it sounds and how carefully it is made: the nursery-rhyme chant, the obsessive rhyme, the layered father-husband-tyrant figure, the deliberately provocative history. If a question asks about the power, the anger, or the sound of Plath’s poetry, this is your strongest poem, as long as you stay analytical and name its controversies rather than getting swept up in them.

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