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26 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
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Source #1 Card# 14 "You do not do, you do not do" |
This line is directly under the title, which portrays her fathers rejection. |
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Source #1 Card# 15 "Any more, black shoe" |
Here Sylvia is describing the severe, formal, and constricting environment. |
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Source #1 Card# 16 "In which I have lived like a foot, for thirty years, poor and white," |
This shows the claustrophobic condition that haunts her. It also shows the personal suffering and social oppression that she is dealing with. |
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Source #1 Card# 17 "Barely daring to breathe or Achoo" |
In this line Plath is again talking about her constraining environment. She uses the word "Achoo" due to the "oo" sound expressing fear and dread or surprise and release, which shows her conflicting emotions for her father and possibly symbolizing a child's need for her father by using the sound instead of saying sneeze. "Achoo" could also be a reference to the German word "Aching" which means Attention! |
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Source #1 Card# 18
"Ghastly statue with one gray toe big as a Frisco seal" |
Sylvia's father had his leg amputated due to diabetes which resulted in his death. He had one big toe which in her eyes made him loose his divinity.(quality of being divine) |
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Source #1 Card# 19
"I used to pray to recover you. Ach, du." |
This is said in the context of one of "Daddy's" previous lines, with her having to bear "a bagful of god". "Ach, du" is in German, her fathers tongue, and means "Oh, you". In the poem it is meant as her dismissing her father, and it shows her disgust and a reflection of how impossible her father was. |
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Source #1 Card# 20
"But the name of the town is common. My Polack friend says there are a dozen or two. So I never could tell where you put your foot, your root, I never could talk to you." |
These lines show Plath's want of knowledge about her father, and are symptomatic of her and her father's entire relationship. |
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Source #1 Card# 21
"The tongue stuck in my jaw. It stuck in barb wire snare." |
This uses imagery of her tongue being stuck to show her inability to speak to her father due to his effect on her. |
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Source #1 Card# 22
"Ich, ich, ich, ich, I could hardly speak." |
"Ich" is a German word meaning "I", and by repeatedly saying this she is giving voice to guttural blockage and anger she has towards her father. |
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Source #1 Card# 23
"I though every German was you. And the language obscene" |
Plath is showing us here that her father is so invaded in her conciousness that she saw him in other people. He tainted the German language for her so now she sees it as obscene. |
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Source #1 Card# 24
"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." |
Here Sylvia is expressing her anger in a manner of identifying herself as a victim and calling up Nazi imagery. With these lines she is identifying herself with recipients of violence. |
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Source #1 Card# 25
"The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna are not very pure or true." |
Plath is calling out her fathers charm as decieving by using the imagery of beautiful places, and then saying they aren't pure or true. |
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Source #1 Card# 26
"With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck" |
This line comes from an insight of her being wounded |
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Source #1 Card# 27
"I've always been scared of you" |
Here the you is italicized, showing emphasis on her fear of her father. |
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Source #1 Card# 28
"With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo. And your neat mustache and your Aryan eye, bright blue. Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You--" |
Sylvia is expressing what was frightening about her father with a metaphor that compares him to Hitler, yet she is saying nothing specific. She is talking about herself in relation to her father by showing that she feels his awful power as the Jews did with the Nazis. |
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Source #1 Card# 29
"Not god but a swastika so black no sky could squeak through." |
Plath is defining her father as compared to a swastika. A symbol that is a big, looming, blackness that entirely blots out the sky. |
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Source #1 Card# 30
"Every woman adores a Fascist," |
This line Plath is using a sort of self-defense or excuse for the affection she has felt for her father. She is using woman as a generalization so she is not held responsible for what she feels. |
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Source #1 Card# 31
"The boot in the face, the brute brute heart of a brute like you." |
These lines express contempt for her own womanish admiration for her own inclination to surrender to brutality. |
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Source #1 Card# 32
"A cleft in your chin instead of your foot but no less a devil for that," |
The Devil is usually portrayed with a cleft foot, and in this she is comparing her father to the Devil. |
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Source #1 Card# 33
"Bit my pretty red heart in two. I was ten when they buried you." |
Sylvia Plath's father died when she was eight, yet at ten is the age one still needs their father in their life, so she says this to show how he died in a time where she needed him and the loss of him would result in her eternal need for him. This quote also portrays her not only anger, but grief. |
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Source #1 Card# 34
"At twenty I tried to die and get back, back, back to you. I though even the bones would do." |
Plath had sought with her longing and it was so strong she tried to realize the romantic trope of trying to join or meet him in death. |
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Source #1 Card# 35
"I made a model of you, a man in black with a Meinkampf look and a love of the rack and the screw. And I said I do, I do." |
Sylvia constructed a death-bearing man like her father and married him. |
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Source #1 Card# 36
"If I've killed one man, I've killed two--" |
Her Plath is including both her husband and father. This line is ironic because even though she displays them as her own victims, she seems to be the victim of these two men's denial of love for her. |
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Source #1 Card# 37
"The vampire who said he was you and drank my blood for a year, seven years, if you want to know." |
"Sylvia was married to her husband for seven years and with describing him as a vampire and sucking her blood she is showing how he drained her through the marriage yet she dealt with it. |
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Source #1 Card# 38
"There's a stake in your fat black heart" |
Here Plath is describing her fathers heart as fat and black when earlier in this poem she refers to hers as pretty and red. This shows that he was a cold type of man when she herself is the opposite. |
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Source #1 Card# 39
"Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through." |
With the "you" not being at the end of this sentence, it is showing that she is done the confession to her father, yet not done with her feelings of and towards him. By referring to him as a bastard, she is expressing her anger towards his ability to keep a hold on her even after death. |
