Sylvia Plath wrote the poem "Daddy" shortly before her death by suicide in 1963. The poem uses the metaphor of a train journey to represent Plath working through her complex feelings about her father, who died when she was young, as well as her estranged husband, Ted Hughes. Through vivid, surreal imagery and references to death and World War 2, Plath conveys her deep-seated anger and desire to break free of the men who dominated her life. The intensely personal work is considered a prime example of confessional poetry and gives insight into Plath's inner psychological state near the end of her life.

1. Sylvia Plath
◦ Oct. 27, 1932
◦ Feb. 11, 1963
◦ Daddy
By: Razan Abdullah
Instructor: Dr. Najmah N. Althobaity

2. Early Life
• Born October 27th, 1932 in Boston
• Her mother was Aurelia Schober Plath and her
father Otto Emile Plath.
• In 1936 the family moved to Winthrop,
Massachusetts.
• While living in Winthrop, eight-year-old Plath
published her first poem in the Boston Herald's
children's section.
• Plath experienced a loss of faith after her father's
death, and remained undecided about religion
throughout her life.
• Plath attended Bradford Senior High School in
Wellesley, graduating in 1950.

3. College
• In 1950, Plath attended Smith College.
• Awarded the coveted position of guest editor at
Mademoiselle magazine, and spent a month in NYC.
• The experience was her inspiration for The Bell Jar.
• She was rejected for admission to the Harvard writing
seminar.

4. College… continue
• Made her first medically documented suicide
attempt in late August, 1953.
• She spent the next six months in psychiatric care.
• Plath seemed to make a good recovery and
returned to college and in June, 1955, she
graduated from Smith with highest class honors.
• She continued actively writing poetry and
publishing her work in the student newspaper
Varsity.

5. Marriage
• Plath met Ted Hughes in Cambridge at a party.
• A few months later the couple were married on June
16, 1956 at St George the Martyr Holborn in the
London Borough of Camden.
• They both became deeply interested in astrology and
the supernatural.
• In February 1961, Plath's second pregnancy ended in
miscarriage.
• In June Plath had had a car accident which she
described as one of many suicide attempts.
• In July 1962, Plath discovered Hughes had been
having an affair with Wevill and in September the
couple separated.

6. Career
• In 1958 Plath took a job as a receptionist in the
psychiatric unit of Massachusetts General Hospital and
in the evening took creative writing seminars given by
poet Robert Lowell.
• In October, 1960, Plath published her first collection of
poetry, The Colossus and in August she finished the
Bell Jar.
• Beginning in October 1962, Plath wrote most of her
poems for the collection Ariel, which her reputation
now rests upon.
• Her depression returned but she completed the rest of
her poetry collection which would be published after
her death in 1965. The Bell Jar came out in January
1963, published under the pen name Victoria Lucas.

7. Style
• Her works weren’t really appreciated until after her
death.
• Unique uses of rhythm and meter.
• Themes of feminist criticism.
• The syntactic and visual irregularities together create
an unsettling experience.
• Her earlier poems were composed slowly and with
great care, while her later poems were written at a
greater and increasing speed.
• Plath would speak these poems in "her own voice" as
she wrote them.
• She handled very painful and intense subjects such as
suicide, self-loathing, Nazis, shock treatment,
dysfunctional relationships, and homicidal iron tanks.
• The use of parody and black humor rescues her
poetry from total pathos.

8. What is Confessional
Poetry?
• Confessional poetry uses the “I.” It often deals with subjects not
often written about publicly: death, trauma, depression.*
• It is a genre of poetry first identified in the decades immediately
following the Second World War. It was initiated with the
publication of Robert Lowell's Life Studies (1959).
• Other poets whose work typifies this style include Sylvia Plath,
Theodore Roethke, and Anne Sexton.

9. death
• She was obsessed with death.
• Her first suicide attempt was at the age of 20
while she was attending school in Cambridge by
sleeping pills.
• Her 2nd suicide attempt was right before she
found out Hughes was having an affair with
Assia, by auto crash.
• Her 3rd, and successful, suicide attempt was by
CO poisoning, dying with her head in the oven.
• Her son committed suicide in 2009, which
suggests that their depression was genetically
based.
• Her poems deal with heavy subjects like suicide,
self dissatisfaction, and unhappiness in
relationships.

10. Traits of Plath’s Confessional Poetry
• Intimate Subject Matter
focuses on subject matter once considered taboo.
• First-Person Narration
a first-person point of view, allowing the reader to delve closely into the thoughts and feelings of Plath.
• Autobiographical by Design
the poet and the speaker are one in the same and interchangeable.
• Lyrical Craftsmanship
paid careful attention to the use of rhythm and intonation in their poems.

11. Plath on confessional poetry
◦ "I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have, but I must say I cannot
sympathize with these cries from the heart that are informed by nothing except a needle or a knife, or whatever it is. I
believe that one should be able to control and manipulate experiences, even the most terrifying, like madness, being
tortured, this sort of experience, and one should be able to manipulate these experiences with an informed and intelligent
mind."*
Examples of Plath’s confessional
poetry:
Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time-
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal
- from “Daddy”

12. sylvia plath,
Daddy

13. ‘Daddy’
◦ When Plath was four years old, her
father Otto, a professor of German and
biology at Boston University became ill.
◦ By the time he sought medical care four
years later, it was too late.
◦ One of his legs had to be amputated
and he eventually died of complications
from his long hospitalization

14. ◦ “Daddy” was written shortly before Plath's
suicide in 1963, along with many of the other
poems that ended up in her book Ariel, which
was published after her death.
◦ Plath wrote these poems after her husband,
poet Ted Hughes, left her for another woman.
◦ This already difficult change for Plath became
more difficult as she was left to care for their two
young children during a particularly harsh
London winter

15. ◦ His death threw the family into economic and emotional turmoil.
◦ Throughout the rest of her life, which she ended herself in 1963, Plath struggled
with depression.
◦ Though she was a prolific poet, she published only one book of poetry, The Colossus,
and one novel, The Bell Jar, while she was
◦ alive.
◦ "Daddy" is disturbing on its own, but it becomes simply haunting the moment we
picture Plath writing early in the morning before her children were awake, growing
closer and closer to self-destruction.
◦ Sylvia Plath's "Daddy" is not just about Plath's relationship with her father. It's also
about topics such as death, love, fascism, brutality, war, marriage, femininity, and
God – to name a few.

16. Stanza 1, 2
◦ A first line repeated, a declaration of intent, the first sounds of
oo - this is the train setting off on it's final journey through
Electra's many mindscapes and tunnels.
◦ The black shoe is a metaphor for the father. Inside, trapped
for 30 years, is the narrator, about to escape.
◦ But she can only free herself by killing her Daddy, juxtaposed
with the actual real life death of the father, Otto,
◦ when Sylvia Plath was eight years old. He had to have his leg
amputated due to complications of diabetes. His toe turned
black from gangrene.The bizarre,surreal imagery builds up -
the toe as big as a seal from San Francisco, the grotesque statue
fallen.

17. Stanzas 3-4
◦ The personal weaves in and out of the allegory. The statue's head
is in the Atlantic, on the coast at Nauset Beach, Cape Cod, where
the family used to holiday. The father icon stretches all the way
across the USA, west to east, where beauty temporarily exists in
the form of bean green over blue water. Prayer was used in an
attempt to get the father back, restored to health
◦ We move on to Poland and the second world war. There's a mix
of the factual and fictional. Otto Plath was born in Grabow,
Poland, a common name, but spoke German in a typical
autocratic fashion. This town has been razed in many wars
adding strength to the idea that Germany (the father) has
demolished life.

18. Stanzas 5-6
◦ Again the narrator addresses the father as you, a direct
approach which brings the reader closer to the action. I never
could talk to you seems to come right from the daughter's
heart. Sylvia Plath is hinting at a lack of communication, of
instability and paralysis. Note the use of the line endings two,
you and you - the train building up momentum.
◦ The use of barb wire snare ratches up the tension. The
narrator is in pain for the first time. The German ich (I) is
repeated four times as if her sense of self worth is in
question;or is she recalling the father shouting I,I,I,I? And she
unable to speak because of the shock, the obscene stress
within the language? The father is seen as an all powerful icon;
he even represents all Germans.

19. Stanzas 7-8
◦ The steam engine chugs on, the narrator revealing that this is
no ordinary train she is on. It is a death train taking her off to a
concentration camp, one of the Nazi death factories where
millions of Jews were cruelly gassed and cremated during
world war two. The narrator now identifies fully with the Jews,
even becoming a Jew.
◦ Moving on, into Austria, the country where Sylvia Plath's
mother was born, the narrator reinforces her identity - she is a
bit of a Jew because she carries a Taroc (Tarot) pack of cards
and has gypsy blood in her. Perhaps she is a fortune teller able
to predict the fate of people? Sylvia Plath was keenly interested
in the Tarot card symbols for a time. Some believe that certain
poems in her book Ariel are based on similar occult symbology.

20. Stanzas 9-10
◦ Sylvia Plath's father was never a Nazi in real life but the
narrator again focuses on the second world war and the image
of the Nazi soldier. Part nonsense nursery rhyme, part dark
lyrical attack, the girl describes the ideal Aryan male (one of
the aims of the Nazis was to breed out unwanted genetic
strains, so producing the perfect German) who happens to
speak gobbledygoo a play on the word gobbledygook, meaning
excessive use of technical terms. The Luftwaffe is the German
air force. Panzer is the name for the German tank corps.
◦ Yet another metaphor - father as swastika, the ancient Indian
symbol used by the Nazis. In this instance the swastika is so
big it blacks out the entire sky. This could be a reference to the
air raids over England during the war, when the Luftwaffe
bombed many cities and 'turned the sky black.' Lines 48-50 are
controversial but probably allude to the fact that powerful
despotic males, brutes in boots, often have female victims
attracted to them

21. Stanzas 11-12
◦ Perhaps the most personal of stanzas. This image breaks through
into the poem and the reader is taken into a kind of classroom
(her father Otto was a teacher) where daddy stands. The devil is
supposed to have a cleft foot but here he has a cleft chin. The
narrator isn't fooled.
◦ She knows that this is the man who tore her apart, reached inside
and left her split, a divided self.
◦ Sylvia's father died when she was eight, filling her up with rage -
against God. And when she reached twenty years of age she
attempted suicide, wanting to re-unite with her father?

22. Stanzas 13-14
◦ these lines tell us that the speaker tried to die, but did not
succeed.
◦ They rescued her from killing herself by pulling her out of the
sack of death and gluing her back together.
◦ Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes were married, The girl addresses
daddy again, for the last time. There'll be no more communication,
no voices from the past. Note the emphasis on black again. This
telephone belongs to the father.

23. Stanzas 15-16
◦ The penultimate five lines. The poet has achieved her double
killing, both father and husband have been dispatched. The latter
is referred to as a vampire (Ted Hughes) who has been drinking
her blood for eight years.

24. themes
◦ Death
◦ The speaker of "Daddy" is obsessed with both the mortality of her
father and of herself
The poem itself is directed at her dead father
When the speaker's father dies, she sees killing herself as a way to
become reunited with him
She also declares that she has killed him and her husband.
◦ Language and Communication
◦ In "Daddy," the speaker is addressing her dead father
◦ She had problems talking to both before and after his death
◦ This could be because her father was German and didn't speak
English well
◦ Or simply because she was scared of him
◦ At the end of the poem, the speaker cuts off communications with
her father for good.
◦ The speaker's struggle to communicate with her father causes her
great suffering, demonstrating the importance of healthy
communication

25. Conclusions
◦ “Daddy” is perhaps Sylvia Plath's best-known poem. It has elicited a variety of distinct
reactions, from feminist praise of its unadulterated rage towards male dominance
◦ It has been reviewed and criticized by hundreds and hundreds of scholars, and is upheld as one
of the best examples of confessional poetry.