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Daddy Sylvia Plath

1) The speaker describes having a difficult relationship with their father who they associate with German fascism and the Holocaust. 2) As a child, the speaker was terrified of their father and felt their tongue was stuck in their jaw around him. 3) In the poem, the speaker describes finally being able to break free of their father's influence and control over their life through committing metaphorical patricide.

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Flora Boehlke
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0% found this document useful (0 votes)
167 views2 pages

Daddy Sylvia Plath

1) The speaker describes having a difficult relationship with their father who they associate with German fascism and the Holocaust. 2) As a child, the speaker was terrified of their father and felt their tongue was stuck in their jaw around him. 3) In the poem, the speaker describes finally being able to break free of their father's influence and control over their life through committing metaphorical patricide.

Uploaded by

Flora Boehlke
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Ariel

SYLVIA PLATH
I could hardly speak.
Daddy I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene
You do not do, you do not do
An engine, an engine
Any more, black shoe
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
In which I have lived like a foot
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
For thirty years, poor and white,
I began to talk like a Jew.
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.
I think I may well be a Jew.
Daddy, I have had to kí11 you.
The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
You died before I had time—
Are not very pure or true,
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck
Ghastly statue with one grey toe
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
Big as a Frisco seal
I may be a bit of a Jew.
And a head in the freakish Atlantic
I have always been scared of you,
Where it pours bean green over blue
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
And your neat moustache
I used to pray to recover you.
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Ach, du.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You—
In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Not God but a swastika
Scraped flat by the roller
So black no sky could squeak through.
Of wars, wars, wars.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
But the name of the town is common.
The boot in the face, the brute
My Polack friend
Brute heart of a brute like you.
Says there are a dozen or two.
You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
i So I never could tell where you
In the picture I have of you,
Put your foot, your root,
faberand faber A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
I never could talk to you.
But no less a devil for that, no not
The tongue stuck- in my jaw.
Any less the black man who
It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Bit my pretty red heart in two.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I was ten when they burled you.

[48 ] [49]
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.
But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of 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.
So daddy, I'm finally through.
The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through.
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.
Daddy, you can lie back now.
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.

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