You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time---
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off the beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
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.
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.
And the language obscene

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 snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been sacred of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You----

Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
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.
So daddy, I'm finally through.
The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through.

If I've killed one man, I've killed two---
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

     Throughout the poem “Daddy” there is an emotionally distraught rhythm.  A poem Sylvia clearly expresses as a personal experience with an unsettled relationship with her father, Otto Plath.  He passed away when she was eight, so there is difficulty moving forward, his memory haunts his daughter and the unresolved feelings with losing a parent flow through the poem.  There is hatred towards him for abandoning her and agony and with all those emotions built up a Marxist perspective can be found.  Sylvia thought very highly of her father, so highly that she refers to him as an icon, calling him a Nazi almost raising him as high as Hitler.

“I have always been sacred of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You---”

      By that stanza, she has made it known that she has respect for her father, but she sees him as someone above her.  The Have-nots she is refers to is herself and says that the Jews are lower than the Germans.  Placing a clear Marxist point of view, because it is very apparent that Karl Marx saw the Jewish community beneath Germany.  He enjoyed controlling individuals and having hierarchy.  Otto has control over his daughter as Germans do over the Jews. 

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.

    Sylvia feels that she has no control over her own life.  Haunted by her father’s memory, throughout the poem trying to get her father out of her head. 

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time---
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal

      He was driving her to a point of insanity; this is expressed evidently and shows the power he has on her life.  Allowing him to hate herself and want to punish him for her pain.  The imagery is attached to memories and bitterness and has caused her life to be a shambles.  She has permitted another male, Ted Hughes to enter her life, hoping he would fill the void of her father, but she is mistaken.  She holds him in the same light as her father and cannot let his grip, let hold of her, infidelity became obvious during their seven year marriage and it drove her to madness shown in these lines of poetry.

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.

The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.

      Sylvia has allowed another male to dominate her life, allowing a have to have hold of a have-not.  This poem about power and control one person has over another but by the last stanza the thoughts have changed.  She has freed herself from the grip of her father and her husband, free from all the recollections and has no more anger, because she has let go of the painful memories. 

There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.

     One of Sylvia’s famous works, that achieves relief by the end but dramatizes the war in her soul, her father a Nazi and her, a Jew.  It is full of blackness, but a confessional poem that depicts a Marxist theory throughout. 

I will be interpreting Sylvia’s poem Lesbos through the psychological point of view. This particular literary theory tries to analyze the author’s motivation, inner conflicts, and defenses etc in search for a deeper meaning and understanding on their work. Some of the conflicts that Sylvia Plath had to go through were dealing with her authoritarian father, her struggle with insomnia, bipolar disorder, electroshock therapy, being institutionalized, her father’s death at a young age, depression, multiple suicide attempts and the list goes on. Sylvia’s father was a known authoritarian which means he is one who implements rigid rules and demands strict obedience to authority. They require their children to do and accept whatever they say whether or not it is right or wrong which was forever embedded in Sylvia’s upbringing and throughout the rest of her life which is why it is no surprise that she ended up committing suicide and her son did the same as well years later.

The poem Lesbos was written in 1962 which is the year before Sylvia’s final suicide attempt which resulted in her death. She uses imagery as she describes the harvest moon in the third stanza as she states, “That night the moon dragged its blood bag, sick animal up over the harbor lights. And then grew normal, hard and apart and white.” She also uses assonance throughout the poem when she says, “It is love you are full of. You know who you hate. He is hugging his ball and chain down by the gate.” This poem is basically describing a situation where Sylvia notices the chemistry between her husband Ted and her friend Assia while she is cooking away in the kitchen. It is a very complicated and confusing poem that takes a simple situation and drags it out into a literary work of art.  In the line “Clear of voices and history, the staticky noise of the new” means that she is clear and aware of Ted’s past and his way with the ladies but she is unaware, unsure and unclear as to what their future together will end up like. She also uses the term kleptomaniac which is someone who has a problem with stealing things and she is coining that term to Assia who is apparently stealing her husband.