How to Teach Sylvia Plath's Poem "Daddy"

Here are four things to know when the topic of your essay or lesson plan will be Plath’s poem “Daddy”: 

1. 

My Friend, My Friend

(for M.W.K., who hesitates each time she sees a young girl wearing The Cross)

Who will forgive me for the things I do?
With no special legend of God to refer to,
With my calm white pedigree, my yankee kin,
I think it would be better to be a Jew.

I forgive you for what you did not do,
I am impossibly guilty. Unlike you,
My friend, I can not blame my origin
With no special legend or God to refer to.

They wear The Crucifix as they are meant to do.
Why do their little crosses trouble you?
The effigies that I have made are genuine
(I think it would be better to be a Jew).

Watching my mother slowly die I knew
My first release. I wish some ancient bugaboo
Followed me. But my sin is always my sin.
With no special legend or God to refer to.

Who will forgive me for the things I do?
To have your reasonable hurt to belong to
Might ease my trouble like liquor or aspirin.
I think it would be better to be a Jew.

And if I lie, I lie because I love you,
Because I am bothered by the things I do,
Because your hurt invades my calm white skin:
With no special legend or God to refer to,
I think it would be better to be a Jew.

-Anne Sexton wrote this poem, first published in Antioch Review in 1959. Sylvia Plath probably saw one of its earlier drafts in the poetry-writing seminar Plath and Sexton attended in 1959, or maybe Plath read it in the Antioch Review, in which Plath published a poem in 1961. Sexton did not include this poem in any of her books, so it is not in Sexton’s The Complete Poems volume (1981), but is in Selected Poems of Anne Sexton (1988). “M.W.K.” is Sexton’s poet friend Maxine Kumin, who was Jewish.

 2.

“In Russia I was often asked why Plath had taken her own life, and I outlined all I knew—the adultery, the two children, the freezing cold, her history of depression—and was met with incredulity. Against these Russians’ desperate history of slaughtered millions, her misery seemed almost childish, and they had no belief in Freudian theory. They were missing, as perhaps Plath intended that they should, the pain that went to the very center of her fragmented self.”

 

-Elaine Feinstein (1930-2019), British poet, novelist, translator and biographer of the Russian poet Marina Tsvetayeva. The above is the concluding paragraph of “A Close Reading of ‘Daddy’,” an essay available in full here on the British Library website.

 

3. 

Plath’s friend Clarissa Roche wrote in a memoir, “Sylvia Plath: Vignettes from England,” published in Sylvia Plath: The Woman and the Work (1977) that on a visit to Sylvia in November 1962, Sylvia read her a new poem, “Daddy,” and both women laughed and laughed.

4.

Consider how a neo-Nazi might respond to “Daddy,” neo-Nazis being fairly common now, as they were not when the poem was written 60 years ago.

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