Daddy
Daddy, poem by American poet and novelist Sylvia Plath, published posthumously in 1965 in the collection Ariel. One of Plath’s most famous poems, “Daddy” was completed in October 1962, during a brief prolific period of writing before her suicide in February 1963. In images that progress from domestic to demonic, the poem confronts a woman’s conflicting feelings about her father’s death when she was a child.
The poem is composed of 16 stanzas of five lines each. Written in free verse, “Daddy” contains many instances of rhyme, mostly through the repetition of words. The poem evocatively blends monosyllabic nursery-rhyme simplicity with dark themes, including fascism, Nazism, and suicide. Many of these themes reflect autobiographical details of Plath’s life. Her father, Otto Plath, was a German-born professor with an authoritarian streak who had been investigated by the FBI during World War I for alleged pro-German sympathies. (However, a contemporary biographer of Sylvia Plath has maintained that Otto Plath was a pacifist.) He died in 1940, when Sylvia Plath was eight years old.
In “Daddy” the speaker links her father’s death to her suicide attempt years later (“At twenty I tried to die / And get back, back, back to you”), which references Plath’s own attempt in 1953. Meanwhile, the poem’s speaker professes to be 30 years old; Plath was just a few days short of this age when she wrote “Daddy.” Indeed, in a 2012 essay in The Paris Review, Belinda McKeon writes that the poem is “built on a bedrock of anniversaries.”
“Daddy” makes frequent reference to the Holocaust, which not only addresses Plath’s bitter suspicions about her father’s alleged political allegiances and his stern disposition but also conveys the speaker’s sense of suffering. While some critics have noted the ironic tone in these references, others have taken issue with the comparison. Meanwhile, lines such as “Every woman adores a Fascist” have been interpreted by feminist critics as Plath’s confrontation of societal patriarchy and internalized misogyny.
A number of the poem’s lines have been interpreted as referring to Plath’s volatile relationship with the English poet Ted Hughes. They had married in 1956 and separated in 1962 after Hughes’s infidelity.
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.
Indeed, three days before Plath composed “Daddy,” she wrote her mother to inform her that she had decided to divorce Hughes.
In The Paris Review McKeon notes that Plath’s first ending of “Daddy” was softer; she changed the last line from “Daddy, daddy, lie easy now” to “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.” McKeon writes that “the mounting of milestones becomes the pathway to a liberation which saw Plath change her father’s ending from the quieter fate meted out by an earlier draft…to the uncompromising burial of the final version.”
As with “Daddy,” many of the poems in Ariel feature an uncompromising vision of Plath’s experience and searing language. Even Plath recognized the strength of her work in the last months of her life, telling her mother in a letter written in the fall of 1962, “I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name.” Ariel was welcomed as a major literary event, and “Daddy” in particular became a hallmark of confessional poetry and feminist literature. Other famous poems in Ariel include the title piece and “Lady Lazarus.” For a full discussion, see Ariel.