"Daddy"
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 gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal
And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off the beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.
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
An engine, an engine,
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.
The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.
I have always been sacred of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You----
Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.
You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who
Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
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.
Comments (3)
Anonymous said
at 8:39 am on Mar 28, 2007
Not a bad start, Dani. Check the formatting of your page since things are running in to one another in a way that isn't working visually. Strictly speaking this emphasis on Plath is a little out of our focus for the class, something that I didn't catch when the list was put together, I guess. I wonder if you can add something that talks about Plath in relationship to the poetry and/or themes we've been discussing in class re. the literature written from 1900-1945.
Anonymous said
at 6:30 pm on Apr 15, 2007
I tried to add some connection between Plath and Freud to tie it in with Freud's influence on the modern writers and connect with something we've talked about in class. I'm not sure if it works entirely, but I guess you can decide that for yourself. Sorry if I didn't work well with the formatting, I had a hard time figuring out what I should do, especially with the allignment.
Anonymous said
at 8:30 am on Apr 25, 2007
Again, Dani, I think I would try to figure out how Plath continues or rejects modernist predecessors. Try to connect her to some of the writers we've been looking at this semester. Visually things at the top of your page are a little crammed together. See if you can work that out.
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