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

Language in Plaths pappa   The speaker of Daddy might be seen as our collective national child, the voice of a homo that has fallen a long way. thither is an implied gain in the poetry -- of catharsis, liberation -- yet Daddy is fundamentally a verse about loss. The speaker has finally and irrevocably inform herself of the notion of a recovered childhood, the dream of the waters off pretty Nauset. There is no going back, back, back to some illusory idyllic existence, no way to make whole that pretty red amount of money 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 wrinkle with its substance, its images of stark brutality. Childhood and sinlessness are corrupted herein by the inescapable internalization of wars, wars, wars. Conventional images have undergone a desecration not God but a swastika not father but devil not husband but vampire. Language, rather than a agency of connection, has become an obstacle, confining the self (The tongue stuck in my jaw. / It stuck in a barb 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 measured 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, just 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 subsequent to that imagerys appropriation of her -- and, by extension, of us all. Plath demonstrates in this poem that the horrors of history are fundamentally personalized, that human history is simply pe rsonal history 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 super charged analogy, against a backdrop of the Trail of Tears.