Plath’s Daddy Essays: Language in Plath’s Daddy :: Plath Daddy Essays

Language in Plaths pop   The speaker of Daddy might be seen as our collective inner child, the voice of a world that has fallen a long vogue. There is an implied gain in the verse form -- of catharsis, liberation -- however Daddy is fundamentally a poem about loss. The speaker has finally and irrevocably disabused herself of the notion of a recovered childhood, the dream of the waters off beautiful Nauset. There is no going back, back, back to some illusory idyllic existence, no way to make whole that pretty red heart the first oppressor in this poem is the unrealized past (You died before I had time--). The poem exemplifies this in its form, the nursery-rhyme sound, the ooh, ooh, ooh of the end rhymes, so jarring in contrast with its substance, its images of stark brutality. childhood and innocence atomic number 18 corrupted herein by the inescapable internalisation of wars, wars, wars. Conventional images have underg unmatched a desecration Not God but a swastika not father but devil not husband but vampire. Language, rather than a means of connection, has become an obstacle, control the self (The tongue stuck in my jaw. / It stuck in a barb conducting wire snare. Ich, ich, ich, ich . . . )Language, as a conveyor of images, is itself the subject of this poem -- the foot in line three is as much metrical as it is metaphorical, one could argue. Plaths Colossus, her apprenticeship in the Western poetic tradition, with this poem is junked in the freakish Atlantic, exclusively another thrown off oppressor. The language of this world has conveyed the speaker to a place of horrors obscene, it is An engine, an engine / Chuffing me off like a Jew. / A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen. In this sense, Plaths appropriation of Holocaust imagery, much castigated, must be seen as concomitant to that imagerys appropriation of her -- and, by extension, of us all. Plath demonstrates in this poem that the horrors of history are fundamentally personal, that human history is simply personal history judicial writ large, that the brutalities of the age inform every childhood, that the notion of innocence is a sham, a game of cowboys and Indians, to use a less highly charged analogy, against a backdrop of the Trail of Tears.