In the poem “Daddy”, Sylvia Plath describes her true feelings about her deceased father. Throughout the dialogue, the readercan find many instances that illustrate a great feeling of hatred toward the author’s father. She begins by expressing herfears of her father and how he treated her. Subsequently she conveys her outlook on the wars being fought in Germany. Shecontinues by explaining her life since her father and how it has related to him.

In the first stanza the reader realizes that Sylvia Plath is scared of her father. It is quite clear that she never spoke upto him to defend herself. In the first line it is apparent that something is ending. “You do not do, you do not do any more,black shoe,” this shows that she feels that her father cannot hurt her anymore. Also, she knows that she has to let him knowhow she feels. “In which I have lived like a foot for thirty years, poor and white, barely daring to breathe or achoo,” thisexpresses her fear of her father, and illustrates the fact that she has remained silent, unable to speak up or even breathany words against him. “Daddy, I have had to kill you. You died before I had time,” this portrays the extent of her hatredtoward him. That she was so appalled by his character that she would end his life if only she had the strength. But he diedbefore she grew strong enough to stand up to his horrible countenance. The next portion of the poem, “Marble-heavy, a bagfull of God, Ghastly statue with one grey toe big as a Frisco seal,” shows how large she sees his presence. Comparing him tothe weight of marble with the powers of God. However the one grey toe, which was injured, and allowed for sickness to set in,brought him to nothing. Something she had not the power to do, and something as insignificant as a tiny sore could.”

In 1940, Otto developed a sore on his toe and ignored the condition until gangrene overtook the toe and he was hospitalized.Doctors performed surgery, but it was too late. Otto’s toe was amputated in hopes of saving him. Sylvia’s father passed awayin November, 1940.” Source: Butscher, Edward. Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness. New York: The Seabury Press, 1976.

The next passage, “And a head in the freakish Atlantic where it pours bean green over blue, in the waters off beautifulNauset.” describes how Sylvia felt when she heard of her fathers’ infection in his foot. She thinks of it in a kind ofhideous way that makes her sick. “I used to pray to recover you. Ach, du,” shows me that she still cared about her father andprayed for him while he was ill. It is amazing that even though she knew her father didn’t care for her, Sylvia still caredenough for him to worry. But he still didn’t care that she worried. The passage “In the German tongue, in the Polish townscraped flat by the roller of wars, wars, wars,”shows the plot of the poem, where everything took place. This also hints onthe period in history when this happened, however, it doesn’t tell us exactly. In the following stanza it explains further.”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 yourfoot, your root, I never could talk to you.” This tells me that she is looking for where he is from. She doesn’t exactly knowwhere he was raised or what his background is because there are many towns with the same name. Therefore, she is unable tounderstand his upbringing, which developed his coldhearted character.

As Sylvia gets older and begins to understand the wars in Germany, she relates her life to the many conflicts they bring withthem. “The tongue stuck in my jaw. It stuck in a barbwire snare. Ich, ich, ich, ich, I could hardly speak.” Again thisdescribes her fear toward her father. She is so afraid of him that she can’t talk and speak out against him. The barbwirerepresents the war that was taking place. She relates to the victims of war and sees herself caught in the barbwire that hasbeen put up by her father, which keeps them separated. “I thought every German was you. And the language obscene an engine,an engine chuffing me off like a Jew.” This shows that she saw the similarities between the Germans and her father. Herfather sometimes treated her as badly as the Jews were being treated. He didn’t think of her as a daughter, but rather as athing that was a burden to him. “A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.” These were concentration camps. She compared her innerfear of her father and her hatred for him to these camps. She felt as if she was trapped inside one of these camps with noone to turn to. “I began to talk like a Jew. I think I may well be a Jew.” Again, she describes herself as a Jew feeling likeher father is pushing her away. “The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna are not very pure or true.” This shows thatshe realizes her father is a harmful man. She knows that some things, like her father, are not very honest or moral. It islike she understands her father’s ways and realizes that they are not his own, but are the ways of the Germans. “With mygypsy-ancestress and my weird luck and my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack I may be a bit of a Jew.” She is questioning herrelations with her father. She accepts that she is not like him. In a way wishes she were a Jew. She had rather be his bornenemy than his daughter that he cared nothing for. “I have always been scared of you, with your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.”She admits her fear to her father. This is the first time she has stood up to him. And even though he is dead it makes herfeel better to do this. “And your neat moustache and your Aryan eye, bright blue. Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You” Thisdescribes her fathers appearance. She also makes reference to the distinguishing characteristics of the Aryan race. TheGerman belief in a perfect civilization where everyone has blue eyes and blonde hair is the root of their racialdiscrimination. “Not God but a swastika so black no sky could squeak through.” She disagrees with the swastika symbol andthinks of it as an evil idol. Seeing that everything it stands for is wrong and unjust she is opposed to it. “Every womanadores a Fascist, the boot in the face, the brute brute heart of a brute like you.” She is mocking the brutality German menshow toward women. The German militaristic culture developed a behavior of man, which had little respect for the women intheir society.

In her later years, Sylvia is able to reflect on life with her father in a more objective manner. “You stand at theblackboard, daddy, in the picture I have of you, a cleft in your chin instead of your foot but no less a devil for that, nonot any less the black man who bit my pretty red heart in two.” She describes him as a devil with a cleft in his chinsymbolizing the hoofed foot of s demon. In her eyes he is a monster whom she has been afraid to confront all of her life. Sheadmits that he has hurt her in the past. She references him with the color black, to illustrate that he is a kind of darkperson. “I was ten when they buried you. At twenty I tried to die and get back, back, back to you.” She compares her father’sdeath with the attempted suicide of her own. She felt that if she could die that it would punish her father. “I thought eventhe bones would do. But they pulled me out of the sack, and they stuck me together with glue.” This passage states that shealmost died. People took care of her and prevented her from committing suicide. “And then I knew what to do. I made a modelof 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.” Since she couldnot bring her father back to life she decided to find someone just like her father. She married a man that resembled herfather and even acted like him. “So daddy, I’m finally through. The black telephone’s off at the root, the voices just can’tworm through.” She realizes that she has given up hope of living. She can’t hear anyone anymore trying to tell her to live.She doesn’t want to listen to them anymore. “If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two - The vampire who said he was you anddrank my blood for a year, seven years, if you want to know.” She describes her husband as a Vampire. It is similar to theway she thinks of her father. She compares them with symbols that are both evil. “Daddy, you can lie back now. There’s astake in your fat black heart and the villagers never liked you.” This shows the comparison of her husband and her father.She describes them both now as vampires. She expresses a feeling similar to that of the general German population, many ofwhich disliked the ways of Nazis. “They are dancing and stamping on you. They always knew it was you.” The people that knewher father didn’t like him, nor did they like the ways of the Luftwaffe. They are glad that he and the powers of the Nazisare dead and are celebrating. “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.” This shows that her life of worrying and being scaredof her father is over. She has been running from the thought of him her entire life. Sylvia has resolved all her problem withhim and finally managed to leave the life that she knew behind.

It is apparent that Sylvia wishes to introduce her readers to what life would have been like for the women and childrenwithin Nazi Germany. The upbringing and treatment was often harsh and mentally destructive. Being raised in a militarilybased home, she was treated as if she were a burden to her father. She often relates her own persecution by her father to thediscrimination Germany had toward the Jews. Sylvia had many struggles in her life that were cause by either her father,Germany, or her husband. All of which left her with a feeling of insignificance, as if they would have been happier withouther. It is certain that this feeling she expresses is also felt and carried by other German wives and children. The basicpurpose of the poem is to dictate her feelings toward all of these men, mainly her father. This release of all that has beencarried inside her is a means of closure for the treatment she has received. As a larger picture, Sylvia has also documented,from the inside, what it was like for the German dependant in a time of terrible hatred toward people who were seen as weakand insignificant.

June 8, 1966

A Kind of Heroism By THOMAS LASK

ARIEL: Poems

By Sylvia Plath.

The strength of feeling and the intensity that play about these posthumously published poems, the relentless honesty that permeates them are so great that at first meeting the reader shrinks from their impact, and then wonders where the poet summoned up the resources to be so unsparing and so open-eyed about herself. In poem after poem dealing with the closest of human relationships, those with father, friend, mate, child, Sylvia Plath reveals feelings that are bitter, tormented, nappeasable. And she sets them down in primary colors, their very brilliance conveying their intensity. “Lesbos”, for example, is an encounter with another woman amid the trivialities of the kitchen. In the hands of another poet, it would have been a genre piece; in Miss Plath’s hands it becomes the expression of a hard-edged hatred.

Viciousness in the kitchen!
The potatoes hiss.
It is all Hollywood, windowless,
The fluorescent light wincing on and off like a terrible migraine.

I’m doped and thick from my last sleeping pill.
The smog of cooking, the smog of hell
Floats our heads, two venomous opposites.

And the irony of the title, with its suggestion of classical calm and of an entirely different relationship, adds to the bitter force of the poem.

Husband and Wife at War

In “The Rival,” a title also ironic in its own way, the two warring figures are husband and wife. It is one of those rarely-met poems that even on a first reading seems flawless. It is a poem in which metaphor, subject and, above all, tone, combine to produce the effect of cold, furious animosity. Miss Plath uses the oldest of devices, the coldness of the moon, but with a result spectacularly unromantic:

Her O-mouth grieves at the world; yours is unaffected,
And your first gift is making stone out of everything.
I wake to a mausoleum; you are here.

No day is safe from news of you,
Walking about in Africa maybe, but thinking of me.
In “Daddy,” the tone is much more shrill and painful, the tension between love and its opposite is barely kept from spilling over:

There’s a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

It would be dead wrong to let these extracts suggest that her work is marked by anger or petulance. On the contrary, her unhappiness is so deep-rooted, her suffering so unanswerable that they seem to stem from something deep in man himself. Over these poems hover threatening forms, all things ominous; in railroad trains, in hillsides obscured by fog, in the swarming of bees, “The Bee Meeting” tells of the donning of protective gear and the examining of a hive. But Miss Plath makes it read like the journey to a dark wood in the middle of life.

She is deeply bound up in the self, but it is a self that responds to all other suffering. In “Lady Lazarus,” a longish poem that has an Emily Dickinson pithiness of language and even some of her rhythm, she writes:

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you can say I have a call.

“I turn and burn,” she adds. “You poke and stir./Flesh, bone, there is nothing there/A cake of soap,/A wedding ring,/A gold filling.”

Thus she unites in one death, the deaths of those who, unlike Lazarus, did not come back.

Impatient Writing

Her lines are usually short and her writing has an impatience, a nervous energy almost as if the ideas came into her consciousness in staccato fashion. But the sophistication in the use of rhyme in “Daddy,” and the long relaxed lines in “Tulip” show the craftsman at work. The language is direct, sometimes almost chatty, but free of the easy confessionals of so many others writing today. Sometimes, as in “The Applicant,” an air of flippancy crosses the seriousness of a poem in a way hard to quote out of context, but wonderfully effective in it:

How about this suit-
Black and still but not a bad fit.
Will you marry it?
It is waterproof, shatterproof, proof
Against fire and bombs through the roof.
Believe me they will bury you in it.

An American poet who lived in England in the last years of her life, Sylvia Plath was the author of a previous collection, “Colossus.” She died in 1963 at the age of 31. On the dust jacket to “Ariel,” the British critic, A. Alvarez, is quoted as saying that these poems read as if they were written posthumously. It is a comment that has point. For there is a finality to these poems, a summing up that is usually reserved as a last testament. To be so honest about oneself as Miss Plath was, to permit no compromise to mar the expression of that honesty takes great courage. But that there was more to her writing than courage, every lacerating line shows.