Daddy (1962). Content and Description

The 34th poem Plath slated for Ariel, “Daddy” is a controversial poem much debated by critics; Plath wrote the poem just four months before her death.

It opens as a child’s poem, the speaker a daughter talking directly to her father for 80 lines divided into 16 five-line stanzas, notably employing childlike rhymes and an allusion to the nursery rhyme “There was an old woman who lived in a shoe” in the first stanza. The poem’s content and increasingly violent language, however, are anything but childlike.

The poem focuses on the liberation of a woman, who has lived for “thirty years,” haunted by her relationship with her father, a man who died many years before but still occupies the speaker’s imagination, a ghostly specter the speaker vows to kill. Rather than create a realistic portrait of a father, Plath weaves alarming images, ranging from an all-powerful God to a misogynistic Nazi to a sadistic devil to a bloodsucking vampire—a figure she has known personally, privately, and also a superhistorical figure capable of embodying everything from such abstract notions as evil and control to realistic crimes against humanity.

The poem is never clear about whether the historical references are meant as a social, political commentary or whether the exalted images merely represent the overreaching imagination of an embittered woman plagued by a psychological disposition that imbues her with nightmarish, schizophrenic, psychotic visions. What is clear is that the speaker is deeply divided and intends to commit patricide, exorcising the daddy figure who has towered over her throughout her life, intimidated her, controlled her, and left her paralyzed, unable to escape her father’s clutches or interact with the world, imprisoned in the space to which she has been confined, and emotionally scarred.

Before the poem was published, Plath read it for a BBC radio broadcast in October 1962. Introducing the poem she said: “The poem is spoken by a girl with an Electra complex. Her father died while she thought he was God. Her case is complicated by the fact that her father was also a Nazi and her mother very possibly part Jewish. In the daughter the two strains marry and paralyze each other—she has to act out the awful little allegory once before she is free of it” (Plath, Collected Poems 293 n. 183).

While it would seem clear from Plath’s description that the poem is about a persona she created, many critics have read the poem as a portrait of her father, or at least a dramatized, hyperbolic image of her father inflected with Plath’s own psychological disposition. Such biographical cues as the story Aurelia Plath has told of the young Sylvia’s vowing never to pray to God again after her father died are woven into the text, tempting readers and critics to interpret “Daddy” as an autobiographical work. One of the many critics to take offense at the poem’s content and follow an autobiographical interpretation, Leon Wieseltier wrote in his 1976 review for the New York Review of Books, “Whatever her father did to her, it could not have been what the Germans did to the Jews” (20).

As with so many of Plath’s works, such a reading discounts the universal qualities of the poem, which, in violent language and arresting images, captures a woman haunted by her past relationship with her father and the husband who, for seven years, has controlled her. In order to survive, she has to relinquish the past, to allow it to die, requiring going through the grieving process, whose many stages include admitting anger.

Her vitriolic poem announces her desire to be free, voices the courage she has mustered, and reveals the knowledge she has gleaned about herself. Thus, despite its anger and anguish, the poem deals with understanding the self and facing the past: the process of regeneration necessary to heal.

What remains to be resolved, however, is how much the speaker really understands about herself and what she plans to do next. Subtle cues such as “The Black telephone’s off at the root, / The voices just can’t worm through” (stanza 14) and “I’m through” (end of stanza 16), imply action, something the speaker will do to remedy her torment. The question remains, What will she do? Will she take her own life (she has already told us, “At twenty I tried to die” in stanza 12)? Will she seek treatment? Will she be able to face the pain and survive? The poem ends without a sense of resolution, leaving the reader with an anguished feeling that mirrors the speaker’s fragmented self, a deliberate lack of closure that enables the poem to be read in many different ways.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. Find a copy of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s book On Death and Dying. In it, she identifies five stages that dying patients and those who have lost a loved one experience. Find connections between Kubler-Ross’s ideas and Plath’s poem. Reflecting on these, what psychological insights does Plath’s poem offer?

2. What similes and metaphors does Plath use in this poem to help convey the speaker’s feelings about her father?

3. As does “Daddy,” Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved portrays a woman, Sethe, who is attempting to come to terms with the past. Of course, Morrison and Plath are different writers writing at different times. Nevertheless, interesting comparisons between the two characters can be made. Read Beloved and then write an essay comparing the women who battle the past. How do both deal with loss? How do both intend to heal?

Fever 103° (1962). Content and Description

Written just one week after “Daddy,” “Fever 103°” “perfects,” as Tim Kendall observes, “the normally short-lined triplets which immediately become Plath’s standardized pattern: she employs them on seven occasions over the following nine days. Their effect is vertiginous: although ‘Fever 103°’ does sometimes return to the relative stability of an iambic pentameter. . . , usually the lines are shorter, often enjambed, and their downward spiral mimics the velocity of the speaker’s thoughts and desires without allowing pause for a breath” (162).

Introducing the poem for her BBC reading of the poem, Plath said: “[It] is about two kinds of fire—the fires of hell, which merely agonize, and the fires of heaven, which purify. During the poem, the first sort of fire suffers itself into the second” (Collected Poems 293). In “Fever 103°” the speaker vacillates between feverish delusions and astounding insights, “flickering, off, on, off, on” all night long (10.2). As do the Pilgrim in Dante’s The Divine Comedy, Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey, and Aeneas in Virgil’s Aeneid, the speaker performs a ritualistic descent, traveling to the gates of hell, where she is reborn, as her old self dissolves and ascends to paradise. As in Jesus’ death and resurrection, the speaker has suffered for “Three days. Three nights.” (11).

Here Plath weaves myth with the sickness she has known, providing nightmarish images of hell and of Hiroshima and hallucinogenic visions of becoming her own thermometer as she travels to the bathroom and sees gifts that friends have left to encourage her recovery: She is “Attended by roses, / By kisses, by cherubim, / By whatever these pink things mean” (16.3-17.2). Plath also evokes other figures who have suffered emotionally and psychologically, such as the reference to Isadora Duncan (stanzas 4 and 5), who was strangled with her own scarf in the wheel of a car after the death of her two children.

Packed with autobiographical material, literary allusions, references to minority groups, and historical atrocities—larger-than-life, real-world references that some critics have questioned—“Fever 103°” presents serious challenges for readers. Yet, for Plath, such a blend of personal, literary, and historical events constitutes art. In an interview with Peter Orr, for example, Plath described how poetry dealing with personal experiences should “be relevant, and relevant to the larger things, the bigger things such as Hiroshima and Dachau and so on” (170).

So, regardless of the criticism she has received for co-opting others’ experiences and cataclysmic events for her own purposes, “Fever 103°” illustrates Plath’s poetic vision of what art should accomplish, a vision she developed over time and arrived at late in her short life.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. Tracy Brain argues that the poem’s “images of melting and forced fusion also reflect postwar and cold war concerns with the effects of nuclear explosions on the human body. The 1959 film Hiroshima Mon Amour, directed by Alan Renais and written by Marguerite Duras, seems a likely influence here” (118). First, visit the Hiroshima Archive maintained by Lewis and Clark College: http:// www.lclark.edu/~history/HIROSHIMA/. After seeing the devastation of the bomb, view Hiroshima Mon Amour. Finally, evaluate Brain’s claims in a well-developed essay. Is Brain justified in making such bold statements? If so, do the images in the poem form a sociopolitical commentary, or do you feel that Plath’s allusions are gratuitous?

2. “Fever 103°” can be seen as an elegy, a poetic form that takes its name from the Greek elegos, a reflection on the death of someone or on sorrow in general. Compare “Fever 103°” with other famous elegies such as Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751) and Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” (1865). What do these three poems have in common? Create a well-developed essay that synthesizes the three works and enables readers to appreciate Plath’s poem as part of the elegiac tradition.

3. “Tulips” (March 18, 1962), Three Women: A Poem for Three Voices (March 1962), and “Fever 103°” (October 20, 1962) all deal with hospitals and sickness. With this in mind, write a well- developed essay that analyzes the three works and addresses Plath’s hospital obsession. To extend this essay, you may want to read The Bell Jar with all of its hospital scenes, which are often horrific. Do these scenes, largely autobiographical, inform Plath’s late poetry?

4. Note Plath’s incorporation of the Holocaust in “Daddy,” “Lady Lazarus,” and “Mary’s Song” and of Hiroshima in “Fever 103°” and “Mary’s Song.” Early critics often accused Plath of using these events for her own purposes. Do you agree that Plath overstepped her bounds in incorporating these atavistic horrors, or do you subscribe to the aesthetic Plath aspires to, one in which personal events should be linked with larger issues? As you wrestle with this issue, you may want to examine first-person accounts of these events, such as Elie Wiesel’s Night (1958) and Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl (1947), or second-generation accounts such as Joy Kogowa’s Obasan (1981) or Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977). Consider who has the right to tell of such atrocities and what his or her moral obligations are in doing so. After weighing this evidence, write a well-developed essay on Plath’s incorporation of the Holocaust and of Hiroshima in her works.