From Birth to Death in Sylvia Plath's Daddy Anonymous College

Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” takes the reader through a journey from birth to adulthood in the life of the subject. Incorporating several strategies including imagery, sound and rhyme schemes, Sylvia Plath brings the reader through a journey as the subject deals with her father in various ways throughout the lifetime. Some interpret this poem as an autobiographical poem discussing Sylvia Plath’s relationship with her own father and certainly the personal aspects of the poem are compelling. However, the poem is intrinsically fascinating for the way that it depicts a particular father-daughter relationship as a dysfunctional one.

The first stanza is very child-like and incorporates sounds to depict the woman as a baby. The first two lines “you do not do, you do not do | Any more, black shoe” is a piece of doggerel that is reminiscent of a child cooing (note the repetition of “do” as in “do do do”) and a jump rope line “one two button my shoe” very popular among toddlers and children. The stanza ends with “Achoo” which is the sound of a sneeze, but is also echoed in the end of the third stanza where she incorporates the German “Ach, du.”

The second stanza depicts the relationship that the woman has to her father as a child and it’s the...