Daddy..O daddy

Dinar Mukminia Asokya

0403508020

poem review

Daddy-Sylvia Plath

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 the 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 gypsy 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 villagersnever liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through

Daddy, Sylvia Plath's work, written in 1962, shortly before her death. Her life was no longer (October 27, 1932-February 11, 1963) with great sorrow and she went through her life with great depression. That was why she was found dead because suicide. This work could be the real proof of what she felt during her life, how a figure of father haunted the rest of her life.

In this poem, it was obvious that Sylvia really hated her father. It was absolutely different with other father-daughter relationships. This poem contains only invective that she could not tell because her father passed away when she was eight. Some ways I asked to myself, “how could a child who was left death by her father when she was eight could grudge him very extremely?” the next question was, “what did the father does to her?”.

Maybe we can answer those questions by looking into the contents of this poem. From the first stanza she said, “In which I have lived like a foot; For thirty years, poor and white; Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.” From these sentences, the first impression was her fear of her father. She might live in his authoritarian until she could not move, she could not breath, she could not even sneeze.

She even wanted to kill her father. She tried to reveal and tried to make the readers understand what her father was by making some imageries, like, “Marble-heavy, a bag full of God” and “And a head in the freakish Atlantic”. Those really represented her father who could not understand her because he had different ideas.

Because of the father was an immigrant from Germany[1], she generalized him like other Germany. I think what she meant was Hitler because she said about wars. Until she mentioned herself as Jew who could not do anything to defend their rights as human. Take a look at the sixth stanza. She said, “think I may well be a Jew.” The next stanza she made a methapore “panzer-man, panzer man”. Panzer[2] was German tank which was used in WWI.

Although she really hated her father, (I don’t know is it unfortunately or predictably) she got a husband who had the same personalities. Unfortunately, her life continued in suffering because she still had a person who trampled her like a shoe. Predictably, because she actually liked the kind of guy like that. She said in the 10^th stanza, “Every woman adores a Fascist; The boot in the face, the brute; Brute heart of a brute like you.” So, for the rest of her short life, the figure of creepy father who really haunted her because she had a husband like that.

If I could connect it to her era, feminist era, which she lived in, I think the main problem was she had a father who did not listen to her, probably because she was a girl. In addition, she was finally married to the same figure as his father. It could be the same characterization of men in that era, authoritarian or they could be a friend to their wife, because they only think that women as an object rather than subject. Who did not need to hear, did not need to be asked their opinion. Which finally affected to the quality of their relationships, how they communicate, and finally made the husband found another woman, like what Sylvia’s husband did[3].

Besides of all kinds of background life of the author, I love this poem. Because she could reveal the feeling of her heart very well. She used some metaphors that really represent the condition. It could be as a good example when we want to spread our feeling into poetry.

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[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Plath. Early live, first sentence.

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panzer

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Plath. Career and her marriage.