Daddy
By Sylvia Plath
STANZA 1 :-
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 grey toe
Big as a Frisco seal
And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.
Explanation
(line 1-8)
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,
The poem starts with the speaker declaring that she will no longer put up ( she will forget her father and will live without him happily). She compares her father with the black shoe, in which she lived for thirty years poor, helpless and scared. The image of the shoe shows the harsh life of Sylvia Plath. The speaker is poor and would not dare to breathe or sneeze, she feels trapped and scared.
The speaker further says to her father that he died early, she did not get time to know each other. She is sad and angry for her father. She is depressed, upset and shocked and therefore, she makes a violent sentiment. She also says that she will live normal life without him and he will no longer be present in her memories and life.
Line 8 shows the confused feeling of the speaker. The speaker uses Marble-heavy image which means that she refers to the heavy corpse or a marble grave stone of her father. ( the image also refers to the hard heart of her father).
The image of her father as a "bag full of God" shows that her father controlled her world. The speaker's life is full of his memories because of his early death, so he seem to her as powerful as God.
Line (9-13)
Ghastly statue with one grey toe
Big as a Frisco seal
And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
These lines shows us the image of the speaker's father as a statue. But he is not normal statue, he is ghastly and huge. One of its grey toe is as big as a frisco (as in San Francisco California).
The speaker describes the Atlantic as " freakish" strange but it sounds pretty, pouring, its waters ( waves) green as a bean, over the blue of the ocean. The speaker also says that Nauset, a region on the shore is beautiful.
These lines show us that statue stretches (spreads) from coast to coast of the united statues, with a toe in the pacific and a head in the Atlantic ( the statue is the image of the speaker's dead father in her mind.
Line (14-15)
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.
The speaker says that she used to pray to "recover" him. She wants to live without him and she does not pray to get her father back any more. "Ach" "du" a phrase in German actually means " oh , you". Plath's father was a German immigrant, that's why she is writing this little sigh in his language. There is conflict in her mind, sometimes she wants him back from the dead and sometimes she wants him no more in her life.
STANZA 2 :
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
Line (16-18)
In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
The speaker is talking about the German language but in a polish town that has been destroyed by the war. The speaker does not just say something like "destroyed by war", she says it has been "scraped flat by the roller of wars". ( this make us think about the horrible weapon, like bomb used in the wars).
Then, she repeats the word "wars" three times, giving us the idea that this place has been flattened (destroyed) by more than one war.
Line ( 19-23)
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,
Now she talks more about the Polish town, its name is common. The speaker's Polish friend says that there are a bunoh of town in Polack with the same name. because there are so many towns with the same name, the speaker will never know from where her father immigrated. She will never be able to tell her father exactly born place.
Line (24-28)
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.
The speaker also laments that she could never talk to her father because her tongue always stuck. Her tongue traps like a barb wire share. Her tongue seems to get stuck so badly that she can only say l, l, l, l,…….Why did her tongue stick? We are not sure. May be because she is nervous and sacred or may be she is not very good at speaking German. She says that she could hardly talk to her father or she can hardly speak at all.
Line (29-30)
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene
Speaker is telling that she thought every German was her father, and she found his language dirty and offensive. All German seemed to her like her father. She got nervous when she speaks to Germans or German language.
These lines show us that the speaker is deeply disturbed by memories of her father. She sees him in every German person she comes across.
