Daddy

I didn't much look at Daddy, even though it is considered to be one of Plath's best-known poems. That might actually be why I didn't focus on it that much: whenever I tell my well-read family members or friends that I'm studying Plath, all they know are the Angry Woman Poems, the Daddy Issues Poems, and I wanted to make sure I knew multiple examples of her various work to contradict them. I skipped out on thoroughly reading Daddy until now. 

During the First reading of Daddy, I focused mostly on Plath's use of Holocaust imagery: it rubbed me too wrong not to keep an eye out for it. It's much worse in Lady Lazarus: I cringe when she, much too nonchalantly, speaks of Nazi lampshades and melting golden babies. This might be another reason why I stayed so far from Daddy, and Lady Lazarus, because I really don't like how she uses the Holocaust as a literary device. In the seventh stanza of Daddy, for example:

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 engine is the German language, a language that Plath never learned which probably made her feel distant to her father. To use the image of the trains that transported the Jews to concentration camps to convey this, however, is a little insensitive. Okay, a lot insensitive. 

There is a lot to like in the poem, though. The use of German in the poem is interesting. In stanza three, she writes: "I used to pray to recover you. / Ach, du." which might be a reflection on the first stanza, where she barely dared to "Breath or Achoo." Ach du translates to 'Oh, you'. There's also the lines in the 6th and 7th stanzas: 

I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw. 

It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich.

As someone who studies a second language, I can hear the 'Ich' line with an unrefined accent, each repetition slightly different, trying out something new. I haven't read the journals so I don't know if she had tried to learn German or what, but it sounds like she tried to to connect with her father.