Personal Literary Narrative

Sylvia Plath

I read Daddy by Sylvia Plath for the first time in my 9th grade English class. Before that I had been strictly fiction reader and had never paid any attention to poetry. But at that moment in that classroom, I realized how incredible poetry could be.

I read through the poem on my own before we discussed it as a class.


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.

At that first reading I saw a poem about a father's shoe. It was the sad poem of a girl who's father died and a whole lot of symbolism that went right over my head.

But then we talked about it in class and my eyes were opened to the beauty of meaning hidden inside words. Suddenly the shoe in that first stanza was not just a shoe, but a weapon a father used to beat his daughter. It became the place that a sad little girl hid from her father and felt as cared for as a foot.

The repetition in the first line wasn't just to take up space but a type of rhythm that made the poem sound sing-song-y like a little girl who still calls her father "Daddy". In fact, the first stanza often gets stuck in my head like a nursery rhyme.

The more I understood, the more the imagery seeped into my mind.

Bit my pretty red heart in two.

And they stuck me together with glue.

The voices just can't worm through.

There's a stake in your fat black heart

And how could I ignore the Rhyme Scheme that really makes the whole poem have that nursery rhyme feeling? The word 'you' and words that rhyme with 'you' are present at the end of many of the lines.

The whole poem is so depressingly beautiful. I find it odd that this is a poem that I connect with considering I've never had any experience in abuse and I had a very attentive father. But every time I read this poem, I am transported back to that desk in that classroom in Georgia and I'm reading it again for the first time and realizing that words are not just words. I'm finding a love in a type of writing that I can never hope to truly understand but that I will continue to read to feel the way it makes me feel.