The opening of the second stanza boldly declares “Daddy, I have had to kill you.” Here, Plath tells the reader that she has had to “kill” her Dad to free herself from his restrictions and tight bounds that she has been held in for the first thirty years of her life. It could also mean that Plath is trying to let go of the memories she has had of her Dad because they only serve to cause her sorrow. “You died before I had time- “ While at first glance, this sentence sounds cold and unfeeling, perhaps what Plath means by this is that her father died before she had the time to properly get to know him, or to understand why he did the things he did. Instead, by leaving their family so abruptly, he left her hanging, and wondering why he was taken from her so suddenly, and she was left hanging with unanswered questions and unspoken doubts. Plath also describes the burdens cast on her by her father. These burdens of hers are represented by the “Marble heavy.....Statue.....Big as a Frisco seal” that all symbolises images of big, heavy objects that she has been obligated to carry throughout her journey in life.
The imagery in the middle half of the poem switches to one of pain and isolation. In the fifth and sixth stanza, Plath states “The tongue stuck in my jaw....It stuck in a barb wire snare. Ich, ich, ich, ich, I could hardly speak, I thought every German was you.” Here, Plath shows that she has been stuck and imprisoned by speech. She felt like she couldn’t talk to her father properly, without the snare in her tongue that controlled what she was saying, and she associates her father with the Germans during the Holocaust, when the Germans controlled the mass media and other sources of information, and so controlled freedom of speech of the people. In the sentence “Ich, ich, ich, ich” (I, I, I, I) - each word is clearly separated and isolated from the other, to show that communication was the factor that separated her from her father. The following stanza shows how she was separated and taken away from her Dad “An engine, chuffing me off like a Jew.” The train that was used to transport Jews to the concentration camps were similarly used to take her away from her father. However, by doing this, her father indirectly kills her- hence the fact that he is “Hitler”- with his neat moustache, Aryan eye, bright blue- to her “Jew”, that he was directly responsible for taking her life away from her. She also refers to herself as a Jew to show the great misgivings that has been done towards her, and how deep her hate towards her father, the Nazi, is. Plath’s reference to gypsies in the next stanza also shows how lost she feels in the world. As the gypsy is a constant wanderer, Plath too is wandering the journey of life alone, unloved and uncared for, just like the Jews of the time.
In the twelfth stanza, the mood of the poem changes, and suddenly shifts to Hughes. We can see the focus is now on Hughes from the line “A cleft in your chin instead of your foot”- which shows that a new person is being represented.
After her father’s death, in order to try to feel and establish a connected to him, she married someone who reminded her exactly of her father- “I made a model of you.....and a love of the rack and the screw. And I said I do, I do.” By marrying Hughes, Plath is committing herself to her own demise, and torturing herself, both mentally and physically, because after all, “every woman loves a fascist”. Just like her father, her husband “bit her pretty red heart into two” and broke her heart just like her father did 10 years ago. Plath then goes on to refer to her husband as a vampire, who sucked the life and feeling out of her for 7 longs years, under which she suffered much hardship under the tyranny of her husband. He hurt her like her father did- “If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two-“ This basically shows that she equates Hughes to her father, so by killing the image of her father, and freeing her mind of him, she’s essentially “killed” Hughes too.
In the end, she manages to get rid of the “vampire” and so, also gets rid of the memories haunting her. As the poem approaches its end, you can see how her hate intensifies and she finally states in the last stanza “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.” By addressing her father directly, it shows the reader the intensity of the sentence, and also the complete absolution that she has won over her father, and finally reaches liberation- be it in life, or death.
