You do not do, you do not do (the narrator begins her poem by forthrightly addressing the absent father)Any more, black shoeIn which I have lived like a foot (the narrator is trapped in this tomblike shoe full of her father’s remains)For thirty years, poor and white,Barely daring to breathe or Achoo^{[3]. (these sounds and actions are mingled with the narrator’s feeling of morbid love-hatred when thinking of her father)}

Daddy, I have had to kill you. (both figuratively and corporeally, the narrator here is asserting her violent revenge)You died before I had time—Marble-heavy (personal and nature-based depictions), a bag full of God^{[4], (basically from literal meanings, it is deducible that Sylvia’s father here is described as being gauche and bronzed, just like a God)*Raised as a Unitarian Christian, Sylvia experienced a loss of faith after her father’s death, and remained ambivalent about religion throughout her life.Ghastly statue with one gray toeBig (swelling due to diabetes[5])as a Frisco seal (During this stanza, the bizarre and surreal imagery gradually forms — his toe as turgid as a seal, the grotesque image of her father has fallen like a statue keeling over.)}

And a head in the freakish AtlanticWhere it pours bean green over blue (the imagery is temporarily beautiful and restored to health)In the waters off beautiful Nauset^{[6]. (this is where the Plath family used to spend their holiday, refer to my footnote)I used to pray to recover you.Ach, du. (This is a German phrase of expressing despondency, and can be translated literally to “Oh, you”; Sylvia might be understandably familiar with German phrases as her father was a German immigrant, who perhaps had faced some of the Nazi atrocities.)}

In the German tongue, in the Polish townScraped flat by the roller (there have been many landscape being repetitively flattened by warfare)Of wars, wars, wars. (Perhaps she is dramatising the war thumping in her soul; or she is burnt with the guilt of German exterminators and the suffering of Jewish victims.)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. (the narrator is undergoing her instability and paralysis; she seems to share no rapport or sense of intimacy with her father)

It stuck in a barb wire snare. (this phrase ratchets up tension为诗歌蓄势, which as one of the poem’s first Holocaust illusions also brings up the image of a train chuffing its way towards final destination, which then in this case is a Nazi death camp)Ich, ich, ich, ich, (the word is reduced to her stammering in confusion; the narrator gets tongue-tied and could "hardly speak")I could hardly speak.I thought every German was you. (Here we see a counterargument: Sylvia’s father, instead of being estimable and perfect, questionably possessed a sadistic streak as an iron-willed domestic tyrant subjugating her mother Aurelia Plath. The biographer Ronald Hayman once revealed that “he used to skin a rat, cook it and eat it in front of his students.”)And the language obscene (here evolves an undertone of abhorrence, and of hatefulness; also “a sexual pull and tug is manifest” according to the critic Robert Phillips)

An engine, an engineChuffing me off like a Jew.A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen. (these are all infamous concentration camps)I began to talk like a Jew. (occult symbology)I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of ViennaAre not very pure or true.With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck (the chalk-white snow and the limpid beer contrast starkly to the miserable deeds inflicted by Nazis under the pretence of racial purity; the narrator is consciously and deliberately choosing sides here)And my Taroc pack and my Taroc packI may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,With your Luftwaffe^{[7], your gobbledygoo[8].And your neat mustacheAnd your Aryan eye, bright blue.Panzer[9]-man, panzer-man, O You—}

Not God but a swastika (a swastika: religious symbol in forms of an equal-armed cross, embodying the prosperity and fortune of countries; also a favourite symbol on ancient Mesopotamian coinage)So black no sky could squeak through. (this line implied the air raids over England during the war, when the Luftwaffe bombed many cities and besmeared the sky black)Every woman adores a Fascist, (this line is powerfully despotic and traumatising)The boot in the face, the bruteBrute heart of a brute like you. *Maybe Sylvia was suggesting in this half mock-eulogising line that: Sometimes in relationships (germane to all human relationships besides love affairs) women are dominated by men; in order to love a man, wholeheartedly, you have to be masochistic. Her marriage with Hughes, instead of being purely a telepathic union, caused Sylvia to feel maltreated and subservient, even worsening the emptiness left by her father.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,In the picture I have of you,A cleft in your chin instead of your footBut 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 dieAnd get back, back, back to you. (these lines prefigure her ultimate suicide at only age thirty; Sylvia has long been pondering that her own death was the unavoidable sequel to her father’s death, following her mimetic desire. The repetition here emphasises her futile desperation, as well as the persecution and detestation she has been feeling ever since her father died)I thought even the bones would do. *her act of suicide would become a twisted revenge mixed with anguish; indeed women have long been criticised for having “withered and blighted petals” pining for the congenial shade of the other sex

But they pulled me out of the sack,And they stuck me together with glue. (the doctor and psychotherapist saved her life when the narrator tried to join him twice in his grave)And then I knew what to do.I made a model of you,A man in black with a Meinkampf^{[10] look (this description possibly also refers to Ted Hughes, perennially decked out in his bohemian poet’s uniform: a regulation black sweater and pitch-dark pants; the roles of husband and father conflate in this stanza) *Sylvia doesn’t sanitise her consciousness at its most centrifugal; she lets the wrong notes in her song stay guilt-ridden.}

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, (she sloughs off her communication with him, the dead, on an attempt to kill his memory and terminate his dominance over her)The voices just can't worm through.

If I've killed one man, I've killed two—The vampire who said he was youAnd drank my blood for a year, (All we can be sure is that people, even intimate ones, tread through their life confined within their irrevocably separate experiences, which are defined by their own backgrounds thus limitations of understanding each other deeply; there is always this palpable sense of enclosure and obstruction. Maybe the more hopeful ending is that those once intimate could now separate, after years of fights and exhaustion. In fact after numerous fights in Sylvia’s marriage, Ted called her a “hag”, who bored and stifled him.)Seven years, if you want to know.Daddy, you can lie back now. (these penultimate five lines dispatch her father and husband, and appear rather reassuring)

There's a stake in your fat black heart *the narrator gets the aesthetic vision, and even the erotic side of this violent scene; there are unexamined areas of herself which are potentially explosiveAnd the villagers never liked you. (the villagers could be interpreted differently, either as the inhabitants of an allegorical village, or as a collective of Sylvia’s own imagination)They are dancing and stamping on you. (This line might be interpreted as a cultural allusion to the trial of Eichmann. As a leading instigator of death in the concentration camp gas chambers, the SS Lieutenant-Colonel became notorious as the “desk-murderer”. He was found guilty by trial in Jerusalem, Israel, and sentenced to hang.)They always knew it was you.Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through. (repeating rhymes)

Conclusion

The poem shunts and screeches round corners now. The narrator here is experiencing her unsought rebirth, which does not confer on her the greater plenitude that during her irremediable unhappiness she once felt she lacked, like a phoenix being burned alive and then reborn in the ashes, the exorcism over and its conflict temporarily resolved.

Readers are stirred by the narrator’s unrecognisable face in various states of mutilation and deterioration. When reading her words, I aways develop a sense of rapport with those marvellously flawed characters; nonetheless, I would not heedlessly presume that they serve as a mere refraction of the writer’s own psychology.

Sylvia's writing is not just some platitudes masquerading as a courageous stand, or ending up burning in hateful repressions, or merely a form of repressive de-sublimation for women. On her epitaph it was engraved that “EVEN AMIDST FIERCE FLAMES THE GOLDEN LOTUS CAN BE PLANTED”, which resonates with Esther’s reflection at Joanne’s funeral that “I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.”

Women have always been fighting for something better, from supporting those disenfranchised, to protesting against gender apartheid in South Africa, to the worldwide #MeToo movement against sexual harassment… There is indeed something filthier under the clean-shaven cover of our normal life. When I was only twelve years old commuting on a full to bursting train (in Tokyo as far as I could remember), I noticed a man, clean-limbed and in clean shirt, kept glaring at me. I wore one of my favourite sleeveless striated dresses paired with sandals. He was standing beside me in a way quite discomforting, his breath rasping in maw while hands twitching his ghastly bludgeon-like penis, his shadow instantly becoming that of an “ogre”.

I felt violated and disgusted, despite the fact that his hands didn’t even touch my skin. It’s only when I turned eighteen, I gathered the courage to write this humiliating experience. The more disturbing thing for me is that the feeling of indignity makes stripping those individuals committing (or intending to commit) sexual misconducts off anonymity so hard; they are hardly blamed for their lecherous gazes, and rudeness.

参考

1. ^The poem was written in 1962, shortly before her death, and published posthumously in Ariel (her poem collection selected by her estranged husband, poet Ted Hughes) during 1963. The word Daddy is colloquial, lacking the formality and implied respect of “Father”, thus going against traditional poems.
2. ^Electra (in the bible): She saves the life of her young brother Orestes by sending him away when their father was murdered, then helps him to slay their mother and her paramour. In Sylvia’s poem The Beekeeper’s Daughter, her father is blithely addressed as “bridegroom” when she psychoanalyses herself. Sylvia’s poem Medusa also delves deep into the father-daughter relationship, or the ambiguous mother-child bond as in Lesbos.
3. ^Achoo: a word imitating the sound of sneezing
4. ^a “bag full of God”: resembling a statue with a gargantuan, slate-grey toe and its head submerged in the Atlantic Ocean; indeed Sylvia revered her father, a hard-working, studious blacksmith’s son who immigrated to America as a teenager and pursued an academic career teaching German and Biology.
5. ^Some background info regarding her father’s career and ultimate death: he died of diabetes, his toes were black with streaks flaming up the ankle. His gangrenous leg had to be amputated. A few weeks later he died.
6. ^Nauset: also the old name for a town on Cape Cod where her father originally arrived in America from Germany
7. ^the Luftwaffe: the German air force, with an uncluttered moustache and bright blue Aryan eyes
8. ^gobbledygoo: this is a word play deriving from the word “gobbledygook” (which means indecipherable, unintelligible language made meaningless by excessive use of technical terms)
9. ^Panzer: the name for German tank corps; it originates from the German word meaning “armoured”
10. ^Mein Kampf is the title of Adolf Hitler’s book, meaning my struggle not aversive to torture