The Shock of Sylvia Plaths Daddy :: Plath Daddy Essays

The Shock of Plaths Daddy   Daddy is one of the most extremely anthologized poems of Plaths (along with Lady Lazarus). It is a notorious poem, the one once compared to Guernica by George Steiner. The imagination and audaciousness of it still shock, so much so that I dont level know if it is being taught or anthologized or taught any more it is virtually as if the critical world has had its say on it and has moved on, each to other poems in Ariel, or to other books altogether, such as The freak or Crossing The Water. It has become a modern classic, of a kind, the categorisation some people (not the ones here, of course) sigh & look suffer 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 gage on the shelf when they were done with the course... Daddy is a mean poem, brutal, however at bottom it is about mourning, loss, and what happens when that grief is block up. I have cont inuously taken this as the real topic, that longing to forgive her engender, forgive herself, to earn 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 breeds threatening for the first 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 real dead. In the poem, she full wants to be with her father (in the reading, her voice definitely becomes aroused when she remembers her childhood with him), or someone like him, but this never whole caboodle out in the end, she turns against him, but, as Stewart says, she can never be by means of - I think, because that sadness is again pushed aside, the voices (her father, husband, m other?) who still might be able to talk and listen to her are gone. Her father is still there, just as solid & historical as he was in The Colossus, and just as misunderstood/inflated (two ways blocked grief seems to work).