Daddy.

Somebody really likes bees. Or hates them. I don't really know. but Bees.


The poem I want to look at today isn't about bees. Its about her Daddy.

I was trying to finish up these blogs before class, and read through quickly to find a poem to use and I started reading "Daddy." It intrigued me because I am a daddy's girl and I always will be. Judging from her other poems, I knew it wasn't exactly going to be a happy poem, but I didn't realize just how exhaustingly sad and depressing it was going to be. Yet, I'm so glad I read it.

I actually cried sitting here at Wake Forest Coffee Company. I don't know what to do with this poem. I don't know what to do with Plath. She is so full of emotion and so good at communicating it. The innocence of a child calling for her daddy paired with the awful destruction and sins of the Nazi's, with the early death of her father, with a picture of failed suicide, with a struggle for identity.

So much pain.

I think the word "Daddy" is what did it though. It- being the emotional destruction that came upon me while sipping coffee.
If she had used any other word, "father," or even "dad" I don't think I would have been as destroyed. But she calls him daddy- a term of endearment. a word that carries with it innocence and intimacy.

A term, I, a 23 year old married lady, still calls her daddy.

Do I have to compare it to another poem? My goodness, I can't take any more of the emotion for one day.

At the end of the poem... that stung too.
"daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through."


By sheer chance, I clicked on a link to the poems of Lisa Zaran who wrote "Talking to My Father Whose Ashes Sit in a Closet and Listen"

"Death is not the final word. 
Without ears, my father still listens, 
still shrugs his shoulders 
whenever I ask a question he doesn't want to answer. 

I stand at the closet door, my hand on the knob, 
my hip leaning against the frame and ask him 
what does he think about the war in Iraq 
and how does he feel about his oldest daughter 
getting married to a man she met on the Internet. 

Without eyes, my father still looks around. 
He sees what I am trying to do, sees that I 
have grown less passive with his passing, 
understands my need for answers only he can provide. 

I imagine him drawing a breath, sensing 
his lungs once again filling with air, his thoughts ballooning."

Ugh... Seriously. I can't even imagine living my life without my daddy.

Now, her poem, while talking about the death of her father, carries a tone that isn't quite as depressing as Plath's. Although her father is still dead she still talks to him and see him living, unlike Plath who just wants to be dead with her father.

While Plath uses scenes and themes of innocence juxtaposed with cruelty and evil to communicate a VERY expressive emotion, Zaran uses images and the senses to communicate her desire and love for her father,

I know this is an academic blog, but just because this made me remember and think of my daddy, I thought I'd share these: