"Daddy" is a controversial and highly anthologized poem by the American poet Sylvia Plath. Published posthumously in 1965 as part of the collection Ariel, the poem was originally written in October 1962, a month after Plath's separation from her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, and four months before her death by suicide. It is a deeply complex poem informed by the poet's relationship with her deceased father, Otto Plath. Told from the perspective of a woman addressing her father, the memory of whom has an oppressive power over her, the poem details the speaker's struggle to break free of his influence.
The speaker begins the poem by addressing the circumstances in which she lives, saying that they are simply no longer adequate. She compares herself to a foot living inside a black shoe. For 30 years she has lived this way, deprived and without color, not even having the courage to breathe or sneeze.
The speaker then addresses her father, informing him that she has had to kill him, though she then says that he actually died before she had the chance to do so. She describes her father as being heavy as marble and like "a bag full of God," as well as like a horrifying statue with one toe that looks like a San Francisco seal—huge and gray.
Continuing the image of her father as a statue, the speaker describes his head being located in the bizarre blue-green waters of the Atlantic Ocean, near the beautiful coastal town of Nauset, Massachusetts. The speaker tells her father that she used to pray for his return from the dead, and then in German says, "Oh, you."
The speaker prayed in the German language, in a town in Poland that was utterly destroyed by endless wars, a town whose name is so common that the speaker's Polish "friend"—whom she refers to using a derogatory slur—says there must be at least twelve of them.
Because of this, she couldn't tell where her father had been, nor where exactly he came from. She couldn't talk to him. It felt as though her tongue kept getting caught in her jaw.
It was as though her tongue were stuck in a trap made of barbed wire. The speaker stutters the word "I" in German, demonstrating what it felt like to not be able to speak. She thought every German was her father. She thought the language was offensive and disgusting.
The speaker continues describing the German language, saying that it was like the engine of a train, carrying her off like a Jew to a concentration camp. She began speaking like a Jew, and then started thinking that she might in fact be a Jew.
The speaker, perhaps still imagining herself on this train, then describes the Austrian state of Tyrol and the beer of Austria's capital city as being impure and false. She then lists the other things that might make her Jewish: her Romani ancestry, her strange luck, and her tarot cards.
She has always been afraid of her father in particular, whom she associates with the German air force and who spoke words that seemed impressive at first but turned out to be nonsense. She goes on to describe his carefully groomed mustache and his blue, Aryan eyes, and then refers again to his link to the German military, this time invoking the armored vehicles used in WWII. The speaker addresses her father as "Oh, You" again, but this time in English.
Again describing her father, the speaker claims that he is not God after all, but rather a swastika—the symbol of the German Nazi regime, so opaque that no light could get through it. She then goes on to say that all women love Fascists, being stepped on brutally by someone who is a monster at heart.
The speaker then recalls a photograph of her father where he is standing in front of a blackboard. In the picture one could see that he has a cleft chin, but the speaker implies that he has the cleft feet of a devil as well. The speaker decides that her father is in fact a devil, as was the wicked man who tore her passionate heart into pieces.
The speaker was 10 years old when her father died. When she was 20, she tried to commit suicide so that she could finally be reunited with him. She thought even being buried with him would be enough.
The suicide attempt was unsuccessful, however, as she was discovered and forced into recovery. The plan having failed, she came up with another. She made a model of her father, a man in black who, like her father, looked the part of a Nazi.
This man had a love of torture. She married him. The speaker, directly addressing her father again, claims she's finally through. The telephone's unplugged and no one will be getting through to her.
The speaker reckons that if she's killed one man, she's in effect killed two. She refers to her husband as a vampire, saying that he drank her blood for a year, no, seven years. She then tells her father he can lie back now.
There's a sharp wooden post, the kind used to kill vampires, stuck through her father's heart. The speaker imagines a village in which the locals never liked her father, and so they are dancing and stomping on his body because they always knew exactly what he was. The speaker deems her father despicable and again tells him that she's finished.
The poem's speaker has been enthralled by her father since childhood yet comes to realize that his legacy is one of violence and oppression. She spends the poem breaking free from his hold over her, but the poem is not solely about this one, specific relationship. Instead, the speaker’s relationship to her father’s memory can be thought of as representative of the broader power imbalance between men and women in a patriarchal society, or a society in which men hold most positions of political, social, and moral authority. The poem implies that such a world subjects women to repressive rules and violence at the hands of men, limiting their autonomy, self-expression, and freedom.
The first indication that the poem is addressing patriarchy is through its title. By addressing “Daddy” (rather than “father” or “dad”), Plath immediately sets up a dynamic in which a male figure is venerated, literally located at the top of the poem, while the female speaker is infantilized; she is an adult addressing her father with a child’s vocabulary, trying to communicate with him through the sing-song cadence of a nursery rhyme.
The speaker then describes the oppressive shadow of her father's memory by comparing herself to a foot that has lived inside a “black shoe ... for thirty years,” too scared to even breathe. In other words, she has been completely smothered by the presence of her father, who is further described as a colossal statue, heavy as "marble" or "a bag full of God." All of these descriptors emphasize the sheer weight and breadth of the speaker's father even in memory, which seems to press down upon the speaker years after his death. This speaks to his personal hold on her, but also to the figurative force of the oppression faced by women in a male-dominated world.
Because of this oppression, the speaker has felt unable to communicate with, let alone stand up to, her father throughout her life. Not only has she "Barely dar[ed] to breathe" for thirty years, but her "tongue" has been "stuck in [her] jaw ... in a barb wire snare." This image emphasizes the sheer violence of her father's hold over her, which denies her any ability to express herself. The poem thus presents the inability to communicate as one clear byproduct of oppression.
Throughout the poem the speaker also explicitly conflates her father with the Nazis and begins to identify herself with the Jewish people—a response that reveals her feelings of utter powerlessness against her father. The Nazis were Fascists—authoritarians who violently squashed any dissent—and this controversial comparison is meant to again highlight the brutality of her father's presence.
Indeed, the speaker even makes the extreme, seemingly offhand comment that “Every woman adores a Fascist.” This not only draws attention to the power imbalance between men and women but also to the normalization of violence against women—violence that is so woven into every aspect of society that women can only be seen to “adore” their oppressors. In other words, this oppression is so commonplace, so accepted, that it is hard for victims to even recognize it, let alone fight back.
To that end, the speaker makes “a model” of her father and marries him. The husband is described as having “a Meinkampf look” and “a love of the rack and the screw,” two images that attest to his violent and oppressive nature. This husband also becomes a "vampire," draining the speaker of blood for seven years—a metaphor for the way marriage, under patriarchy, robs a woman of any life of her own. Moving from her father to another man has done nothing to free the speaker because she is still living within an oppressive world that treats her as subservient to the men in her life.
Only in recognizing the patriarchal violence and oppression present in her marriage and asserting that she’s “finally through” can the speaker metaphorically drive a stake through her father’s heart. In other words, she is not only freeing herself of her oppressive marriage but of the kind of gendered dynamic modeled to her by her father.
“Daddy” deals with the deification and mythologizing of authority figures. It does this through the lens of the speaker’s individual relationship with her father as well as through the historic lens of the Holocaust. In order to see her father clearly, for who he really was, the speaker first needs to puncture her godlike image of him.
Having lost her father to illness at a young age, the speaker develops an obsession with him that follows her into adulthood. The speaker’s father “died before [she] had time—” to see him for who he really was, and because of this the speaker has been trapped inside a childlike perception of her father as godlike. Over the years, her memory of him seems only to have grown in its oppressive power, and she realizes she must destroy her godlike image of him in order to be free. She thus confesses to her father that she has had to “kill” him—or rather, the idea of him which has held her in thrall.
To do so is difficult, however. The speaker struggles to see her father clearly, saying “I never could tell where you / Put your foot, your root.” This image illustrates both her father's vague identity in the speaker's mind and the speaker’s sense of his omnipresence, his godlike ability to be everywhere at once—"I thought every German was you.” This difficulty in pinpointing the man while also being surrounded by the myth of him speaks to her growing understanding that to see him clearly would rob him of his power over her.
The speaker goes on to compare her relationship with her father to the relationship between Jewish people and Nazis during the Holocaust. This comparison not only illuminates her own struggle but illustrates the ways in which power and authority are vulnerable to people’s belief in them.
The speaker describes being scared of her father’s “Luftwaffe” and “gobbledygoo”—on the one hand, the very real physical force represented by the Luftwaffe (the German air force), and on the other hand, the mythology broadcast by their propaganda system, a mythology that—when looked at closely—was nothing but gobbledygoo (nonsense).
She also fears her father’s “Aryan eye, bright blue.” The singular use of “eye” refers more to a watchful, authoritarian presence than to a literal pair of eyes. Likewise, during WWII people were paralyzed by the thought of attracting Nazi attention, behaving every moment as if they were being watched, thus reinforcing Nazi control. Recognizing the fallacy of her father’s power—"Not God," an actual deity, "but a swastika," an empty symbol—the speaker invokes the symbol of the Nazi regime, underlining the fact that in order for a symbol of authority to work, it has to be “So black no sky could squeak through.” In other words, it must block out all light, hope, and truth. The moment one begins to see through the illusion, to the truth of what’s behind it, the symbol loses its power.
Thus only when the speaker is finally able to see her father for who he is, to puncture her illusion of him as a godlike authority, does she free herself of his power. The speaker describes a picture she has of her father in which he stands at a blackboard, apparently teaching a class, a picture which points to his supposed authority. The speaker, however, finally recognizes that he is “No less a devil” just because the image conceals his true nature. The poem ends with the speaker asserting her freedom—“Daddy, daddy, you bastard I’m through”—an assertion she can make because she no longer buys into the myth of him.
The speaker, traumatized by the death of her father at an early age, develops an obsession with mortality. She dreams of bringing her father back to life, and when her prayers don’t work, she even tries to join him in death. When even her attempt at suicide fails, she chooses to bring her father back to life metaphorically in the form of a husband who resembles him. While, on the one hand, the poem can be read as a broad call to puncture authoritarian myths and free oneself from patriarchal oppression, on a more personal level it simply speaks to the pain and confusion surrounding the death of a parent and the tendency to recreate toxic childhood dynamics in adult relationships.
The speaker's father dies when she is just ten years old (in real life, Plath's father actually died when she was eight), and the trauma of this event has lingered ever since. The poem is filled with images of death and decay, as can be seen when the speaker deems her father a “Ghastly statue with one grey toe / Big as a Frisco seal.” This is an allusion to Plath's actual father, who developed gangrene of the foot and eventually died of complications from diabetes. Clearly, it is the image of her father's dying that stays with the speaker, and it is on death that she begins to fixate.
The speaker "pray[s]" to bring her father back, and when that fails she attempts suicide: “At twenty I tried to die / And get back, back, back to you.” She survives the attempt, metaphorically "pulled out of the sack" and pushed back into her life. Yet she is never the same; she has been "stuck ... together with glue," implying a newfound sense of fragility and brokenness upon having failed to reunite with her father.
The speaker then decides rather than trying to reach her father through death, she will bring him back to life in the form of a husband. The speaker thus makes “a model” of her father and marries him. This husband, however, turns out to be just as unhealthy for her as her fixation on the memory of her father’s death. She claims that her husband is a vampire who drank her blood—her life force—for seven years. This image attests to the unhealthiness of the marriage, which drains the speaker of life in much the same way her father’s memory does.
It is clear that, in order to rid herself of the traumatic hold her father’s death has on her, the speaker must entirely close the door on this chapter of her life. She does this through ending her marriage to her husband, an act she likens to killing a man. The speaker claims, “If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two—”, referring to the power both her husband and her father’s memory had over her.
By metaphorically bringing her father back to life through marriage, the speaker is able to exercise control over a set of events that initially left her feeling scared and helpless. Her marriage acts as a re-enactment of her relationship with her father, except this time she is an adult and is given the time she needs to see the relationship clearly. When the speaker chooses to end her marriage, she does so knowing that it will destroy her father’s memory as well, an act that allows her to finally break free of her trauma.
You do not ...
... breathe or Achoo.
The poem seems to begin with the speaker talking to a shoe, and telling it that it doesn't "do," or work for her, anymore (the repetition of "do" here is technically an example of a poetic device called antanaclasis). The speaker then declares that she has been stuck inside said shoe for her entire life, without fortune or access to the colorful outside world, scared of making the slightest sound.
Of course, the speaker isn't actually talking about a shoe. The poem's title is "Daddy," and the "You" the speaker addresses in the first line—via apostrophe—is really her father. The "black shoe" is likely a metaphor for her father's memory, which has a terrible hold on the speaker. The oppression the speaker feels—her poverty, her fear, her inability to breathe—are directly attributed to her father. The speaker is aware of this, and the poem begins with her renouncing her father's memory: "You do not do, you do not do / Any more, black shoe."
The first stanza of "Daddy" has a sing-song rhythm created by the repetition (more specifically, the epizeuxis) of "You do not do" in the first line and the strong assonance of /oo/ sounds, particularly at the ends of lines. In fact, it is not only reminiscent of a child's nursery rhyme; the image of the speaker living like a foot in a shoe is a reference (a.k.a. an allusion) to the famous nursery rhyme that begins: "There was an old woman who lived in a shoe." Together with the title, the fact that the first stanza evokes a nursery rhyme immediately infantilizes the speaker. Despite being thirty years old, she refers to her father as "Daddy" and to a sneeze as an "Achoo."
Moreover, it's clear from her description of the "black shoe" in which she is trapped like a foot—"Barely able to breathe—that her situation in life is oppressive. The image of the foot is telling. If the body is a hierarchy, then the head is in control: it exists at the top, and makes decisions for the entire body. It follows that the foot is at the bottom, bearing the weight of the entire body.
The shoe itself is also an oppressive image. Inside the shoe it is dark and there is no air. It's not hard to understand why the speaker would want to free herself from such an existence.
Daddy, I have ...
... a Frisco seal
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Get LitCharts A+And a head ...
... Ach, du.
In the German ...
... dozen or two.
So I never ...
... ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly ...
... Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to ...
... my Taroc pack
I may be ...
... panzer-man, O You—
Not God but ...
... brute like you.
You stand at ...
... heart in two.
I was ten ...
... together with glue.
And then I ...
... I’m finally through.
The black telephone’s ...
... want to know.
Daddy, you can ...
... bastard, I’m through.
Plath uses the color black in this poem to symbolize oppression. In the first stanza, the speaker identifies her father's memory/her trauma as a "black shoe" in which she has lived her entire life, barely able to breathe or sneeze. She is pale from being stuck inside this shoe, away from the warmth and light of the sun. Her oppression has drained her vitality.
The speaker returns to this symbolism when she describes her father as "Not God but a swastika / So black no sky could squeak through." The color black doesn't allow anything else to pass through it—in this case not even the sky. The speaker cannot see her father through the oppressive, mythological image of him that's been lodged in her mind.
Once Plath has established the symbolic significance of the color black, she begins to use it more liberally. The speaker goes on to describe a "black man" who bit her heart in half, a "man in black" who has the look of a Nazi, and a "black telephone" that is no longer working. In each of these instances, the color has become a kind of shorthand for oppressiveness—referring to the man who hurt her, the husband who loved to torment her, the telephone that allowed painful voices to "worm through." Only when that phone is "off at the root" is the speaker able to be free of the voices and of the oppression of her father's/husband's power over her.
Plath uses imagery related to the Holocaust and Naziism throughout the poem to symbolize the pain and terror of oppression. For example, the image of the speaker's tongue being caught "in a barb wire snare" evokes the barbed wire fences used to enclose concentration camps, placing the speaker in the position of a Jewish person during the Holocaust. This comparison is made explicit when the speaker describes being shipped off "like a Jew" on a train "to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen." These are the names of real concentration camps during the war, in which millions of Jews were murdered.
The speaker is not literally saying she is Jewish; instead, she is—quite controversially—identifying with the plight of Jewish people during the Holocaust to contextualize her own suffering at the hands of oppressive men. To that end, she also mentions her "gypsy ancestress" (the word "gypsy" is now considered a slur for the Romani people, an ethnic group that was also targeted by the Nazis). The fact that the speaker says "ancestress" here specifically describes a female ancestor, underscoring the gendered nature of her oppression.
Plath's real-life father was German, and not coincidentally the speaker links her oppressor to Germany throughout the poem; she even says "I thought every German was you." Of course, the speaker does not just say her father is just German; she depicts him as a Nazi—a man with an "Aryan eye" and a "neat mustache," an allusion to the infamous facial hairstyle of Adolph Hitler. Hitler and the Nazis were Fascists, meaning they believed in extreme authoritarianism, dictatorial power, and the violent suppression of dissent. The speaker thus associates these qualities with her father, and with male-dominated society in general. Her husband, too, is presented as a Nazi, a man "with a Meinkampf look" (Mein Kampf was Hitler's manifesto).
When the speaker makes the ironic claim that "Every woman adores a Fascist," she is underlining the illusion that women are buying into when they accept male authority, those systems and stories that venerate masculinity and punish women. And when the speaker says her father was "Not God but a swastika," she is saying that her father was not in fact all-powerful but rather an empty and perverted symbol; the "swastika" was originally an ancient Hindu symbol commandeered by the Nazi party, the power of which depended on blocking out any dissent whatsoever—on being "So black no sky could squeak through."
The use of the word "swastika" thus represents an important moment in the poem, as the speaker replaces her earlier perception of her father as godlike with an understanding that her father's authority is powerless without her belief in him. And it is not just her father's authority, but male dominance in general that proves to be built on a lie.
The "black telephone" here being torn from its "root" symbolizes that the speaker no longer desires to communicate with her father. The poem has already linked the color black with oppression, so tearing out this "black telephone" reflects the speaker's attempt to break free from her father's continued influence on her life from beyond the grave. "The voices just can't worm through" now that the phone is off the hook, the speaker says, conveying her refusal to let her father's memory taunt her any longer.
By the end of the poem, the figure of the father himself has come to symbolize more than the speaker's actual "daddy." He actually symbolizes a variety of things: death; unresolved, traumatic memory; patriarchal oppression; and more generally, any person or idea in which authority has been invested to the detriment of those who believe in it.
The speaker is addressing her father, but Plath was also addressing all of these huge, complicated ideas that she could only get to through the lens of the speaker's individual relationship with her father. Plath was thinking and writing a great deal about patriarchy and oppression and death and memory towards the end of her life; for her, "Daddy" was the perfect symbol to bring together these various, related concerns.
Between the title and the first two lines of the poem, "Daddy" immediately employs two different instances of apostrophe. The first instance is through the title itself, which is addressing the speaker's dead father—something she will continue to do throughout the poem. Her father, of course, cannot respond; the use of apostrophe thus highlights the continued role he plays in the speaker's life even after his death. She is still trying to talk to him, to tell him something—even if that something is that she wants nothing more to do with him.
In the second instance, the speaker begins the poem by speaking directly to her situation in life, which she personifies by addressing as a "You." She then goes on to metaphorically describe this "You" as a shoe in which she has lived for her entire life.
Because these two instances of apostrophe sit so close to each other, the reader is likely to conflate the father with the oppressive black shoe in which the speaker lives. In this way, it could be said that the speaker is actually addressing her father in both instances, but that he shows up in different ways: as "Daddy" in her memory, but also as an oppressive presence in her life.
The speaker continues to address her father throughout the entire poem, intermittently calling him "Daddy." In the second stanza she declares that she has had to kill her father because he died before she got the chance, informing the reader that she is in fact addressing the memory of her father rather than her father himself.
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
Terrible or frightful; causing fear.
"Daddy" consists of 16 cinquains (five-line stanzas). Apart from that, the poem is not written in any traditional poetic form. The regularity of its stanza lengths, combined with the frequent use of short lines, repetition, and end rhyme, nevertheless evokes the sensation of listening to a nursery rhyme, or at least to something that is tightly controlled. The poem has a compulsive and claustrophobic feel, which echoes the speaker's feelings of being constrained by her father's memory and her place as a woman in a patriarchal society.
The poem's meter is inconsistent. The number of syllables per line ranges anywhere from two to thirteen, though most lines tend to be between seven and nine syllables.
There are moments of meter throughout the poem, however; the most obvious being the first line:
You do | not do, | you do | not do
This line is in iambic tetrameter, meaning it is comprised of four iambs (poetic feet with a da-dum syllable pattern). Because it is the first line of the poem, this might set up the expectation of regular meter throughout the rest of the poem. However, the next line ("Any more, black shoe") immediately undercuts this expectation, as it follows no set meter. The third line again has four feet, but unlike the first line, it is not in iambic tetrameter:
In which | I have lived | like a foot
This line begins with an iamb followed by two anapests (da-da-dum). The last two lines in the stanza then have seven and nine syllables, respectively; there's no overall pattern.
That said, because most of the lines in the poem fall between seven and nine syllables, it is noticeable when a line is considerably shorter or longer than the average. For instance, line 15 is comprised of two syllables, which form a single trochee (dum-da):
Ach, du
The effect of such a short line is that it feels almost like a resting point before launching into the next part of the poem. There is a sense of the speaker's admiration here (Ach, du means "Oh, you" in German), but also a sense of her weariness. On the opposite end of the spectrum is line 36 ("The snows ... Vienna) which at thirteen syllables is the longest line in the poem.
The prevalence of lines that fall between seven and nine syllables throughout the rest of the poem mimics the regimentation of peoples' lives that happens under Fascist authority. The longer lines seem to hearken back to freedoms that have since been stripped away.
Because the use of rhyme does not follow a set pattern, "Daddy" cannot be said to have a rhyme scheme. However, the poem does rely heavily on the use of end-rhyme and assonance—in this case the repetition of /oo/ sounds—to add a sense of rhythm.
Over half of the poem's 80 lines end with an /oo/ sound, such as those created by the words "do," "shoe," and "Achoo" in the first stanza. This intensity of sound is a propulsive force in the poem, and perhaps even reminiscent of the sound of a steam engine train, an image which is important to the poem. (The regularity of the stanzas also could be seen to mimic the individual cars of a train.)
The heavy use of end-rhyme, combined with the poem's short lines, repetition, and the repeated use of the word "Daddy," also contributes to the childlike tone of the poem. The speaker feels stuck inside a childlike awe of her father. She is not only trying to break free of her father's hold on her, but of a cycle of abuse which has been passed down through generations. This cycle plays out in the way the speaker recreates her relationship with her father by marrying a man who is also violent and oppressive. And this cycle shows up formally through the intense repetitive elements of the poem, especially the end rhyme.
The speaker of "Daddy" is a 30-year-old woman who has been fixated on her father's death since childhood, and who realizes that she must puncture the godlike image she has of her father in order to be free of his oppressive hold on her. The speaker has a complicated relationship with her father, as he died before she had a chance to see him clearly. The poem chronicles her journey from being so enthralled by her father that she wanted to die so they could be reunited, to realizing that she is terrified of him, to bringing him back to life in the form of a husband, to finally "killing" the idol that she has made of him.
Many readers have taken the speaker to be Plath herself. Plath did indeed write a great deal about her father, Otto Plath; in one journal entry she noted that "He ... heiled Hitler in the privacy of his home." In an interview with the BBC about "Daddy," Plath described the speaker as "a girl with an Electra complex [whose] father died while she thought he was God. Her case is complicated by the fact that her father was also a Nazi and her mother very possibly part Jewish. In the daughter the two strains marry and paralyze each other—she has to act out the awful little allegory once over before she is free of it."
There are plenty of details in the poem supporting an autobiographical reading. The German-born Otto Plath had undiagnosed diabetes that led to gangrene of the foot, something alluded to by the "Ghastly statue with one gray toe" of line 9. Plath's mother was of Austrian descent, a fact that perhaps informs the speaker's rejection of the "the clear beer of Vienna" in line 36. Otto Plath died from diabetes complications when his daughter was eight years old; the speaker of the poem is also a child when her father dies. He was also a professor, echoed by the reference to the speaker's father standing "at the blackboard" in line 51. Finally, Plath grew up in Massachusetts, not terribly far from the town of Nauset mentioned in line 13.
Because of how intensely internal the poem is, it is difficult to pinpoint a singular, external setting. There is, however, a very vivid emotional landscape which pulls from a variety of historical, contemporary, and mythological settings.
The poem begins with the speaker addressing the situation in which she lives, a situation she describes with imagery borrowed from an English nursery rhyme—a woman living a cramped life in a shoe. This imagery goes hand-in-hand with the poem's nursery rhyme structure, which lends itself to an interpretation of the poem where the speaker has been infantilized and constricted by patriarchy (for more on this, head to the Form section of this guide).
From there, the poem shifts to a contemporary setting. The speaker describes her father as a statue with its head in the Atlantic Ocean, with a toe she compares to a seal in San Francisco. While the imagery is still internal and imaginative (her father isn't literally a statue, nor is he located in the Atlantic), it's referring to the real world the speaker inhabits, and even utilizes a nickname for San Francisco ("Frisco").
As the poem progresses, the speaker begins to identify her situation with the persecution of Jewish people by Nazis during World War II. At this point, the poem begins to employ a more historical setting that evokes this war: steam engine trains transporting Jews to concentration camps, her father's affiliations with the Nazi air force and panzer unit, and the swastika, which was the official emblem for the Nazi regime.
Finally, in the last two stanzas, the poem turns to a more mythological setting, again emphasizing that the struggle of the poem is an internal one. The speaker refers to her husband as a vampire and describes puncturing her image of her father as driving a stake through his heart. There is no actual village and there are no actual villagers; the speaker is simply imagining a scene in which those who have been oppressed are now triumphing over their oppressor.
Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) was a leading light of the Confessionalist poetry movement. Famous both for her intense, personal verse and her autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, Plath spoke what had been unspeakable about womanhood in the first half of the 20th century.
"Daddy" was written in 1963, just months before Plath's death by suicide, and later included in her posthumous collection Ariel (1965). Like many of the poems in this famous collection, "Daddy" can be read as at least partly autobiographical. Unvarnished self-revelation was rare in English-language poetry at the time, as was poetry dealing frankly with motherhood and femininity. But as more and more writers adopted this revolutionary stance in their work during the 1950s and '60s, critics found a name for their movement: Confessionalism.
Confessionalist poets wanted to drop the barrier between themselves and "the speaker" of the poem and to examine aspects of life that a conformist post-war society deemed too indelicate to talk about. Robert Lowell's "Skunk Hour," W. D. Snodgrass's "Heart's Needle," and Anne Sexton's "The Double Image" are all good examples of Confessionalist poetry.
The years after World War II (1939-1945) saw a renewed focus on family life. As men returned home from war, birthrates ballooned during a “baby boom” that persisted into the 1960s. American society promoted an idealized vision of family life that emphasized traditional gender roles, and women were defined in relation to their husbands and children—that is, as wives and mothers first.
As a writer and academic, Plath found many of these stereotyped expectations oppressive. At the same time, she often found great joy and fulfillment in motherhood. Plath also struggled with clinical depression and suicidal ideation for much of her life and died by suicide in 1963, four months after "Daddy" was written.
The poem also draws from Plath's childhood. Her mother, Aurelia, was of Austrian descent (alluded to in "Daddy" with the reference to "the clear beer of Vienna"), while her father, Otto, was a German immigrant and biologist who worked as a professor at Boston University. Plath idolized her serious, domineering father as a young girl and was deeply traumatized by his death, from diabetes complications, when she was eight years old. Her feelings toward Otto grew intensely complicated over the years, as "Daddy" clearly illustrates.
The Poem Out Loud — "Daddy" as read by Sylvia Plath for BBC Radio.
Who was Otto Plath? — A Guardian article regarding the inspiration for "Daddy": Plath's own father, Otto Plath.
Biography and More Poems — A biographical account of Plath's life and additional poems, courtesy of the Poetry Foundation.
A Short Introduction to Plath's Poetry — Benjamin Voigt breaks down a few of Plath's most famous poems.
An Interview With the Poet — A 1962 interview with Sylvia Plath, conducted by Peter Orr.
Confessionalism — A brief introduction to Confessionalism, a poetic moment that helps contextualize Plath's work.