My interpretation of "Daddy" by Sylvia Plath
Marlene Williams
Eng/125
December 15, 2012
Michele Watson

My interpretation of "Daddy" by Sylvia Plath

“Daddy” by Sylvia Plath is a dark and solemn journey through the thoughts of a young girl scorned. This young girl becomes the woman who continues to carry the burden of her childhood in her adult life. The setting and feeling of the poem is dismal and full of rage, a rage Sylvia Plath claims to put behind her in the last line “ / Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through. / “(Plath, 1963) but in reality she was never capable of escaping the pain. The poem “Daddy” if the wording is taken literally as opposed to figuratively and or symbolically, the leads the reader to believe that Sylvia Plath was raised in a military family by an oppressive father who brought his work home with him. The poem entails so much more than what is on the surface, there is a darkness buried deep within the words left for the reader to unearth by searching beyond the words and into the soul of the poet. “Daddy” is engorged with metaphoric references to a dark and oppressive past where Plath equates her father’s hand to that of a Nazi. The reader can be eluded to believe in the third stanza that Plath is describing the uniform of a soldier. ” / And a head in the freakish Atlantic. / Where it pours bean green over blue. / “(Plath, 1963). In reality Sylvia Plath’s father was not in the military, Otto Plath was actually “a professor of biology at Boston University and a well-respected authority on bees” (www.notablebiographies.com, 2012). Sylvia Plath’s father passed away when she was just eight years of age and through the poem “Daddy” one can feel her anger and resentment toward his strict hand in life, as well as the fear and resentment toward his loss so early in her young life. The poem gives the idea that Plath expresses