The Shock of Sylvia Plaths Daddy :: Plath Daddy Essays

The Shock of Plaths Daddy   Daddy is one of the most highly anthologized poems of Plaths (along with Lady Lazarus). It is a notorious poem, the one once compared to Guernica by George Steiner. The imagery and audaciousness of it slake shock, so much so that I dont even know if it is being taught or anthologized or taught any more it is almost as if the full of life world has had its say on it and has moved on, either to other poems in Ariel, or to other books altogether, such as The Colossus or product The Water. It has become a modern classic, of a kind, the sort some plenty (not the ones here, of course) sigh & look back on fondly, as what/who they read when they were younger, or were obliged to read at some point, dutifully used it in an essay, then put back on the shelf when they were done with the course... Daddy is a mean poem, brutal, but at female genitalia it is about mourning, loss, and what happens when that grief is blocked. I have always taken this a s the real topic, that longing to forgive her father, forgive herself, to understand and accept - that was locked, denied, as a part of her childhood, adolescence, until she was 21 and visited (I am taking her literally) her fathers grave for the graduation time. (This poems essence lies in her not believing her father is dead, and since she never went to his funeral, or even visited his grave as a child, the father is in a strange limbo, a zombie figure.) In 1959 she visited her fathers grave and was tempted, oddly as she says, to dig him up & prove to herself that hes really dead. In the poem, she unless wants to be with her father (in the reading, her voice definitely becomes emotional when she remembers her childhood with him), or someone like him, but this never works out in the end, she turns against him, but, as Stewart says, she can never be through - I think, because that trouble is again pushed aside, the voices (her father, husband, mother?) who still might be able to rag and listen to her are gone. Her father is still there, clean as unfaltering & historical as he was in The Colossus, and just as misunderstood/inflated (two ways blocked grief seems to work).