Skip to main content

Sylvia Plath "Daddy" IOC

Excerpt from “Daddy” (Sylvia Plath)
1 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.  
5 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.
10 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.  
15 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.
20 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 gipsy ancestress and my weird luck  
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
25 I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.  
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
30 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  

35 Brute heart of a brute like you.
Guiding Questions:
How does Sylvia Plath's biography influence this text?
What is the effect the Nazi and Holocaust imagery in the poem?
Here is the file of the IOC:

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

This is Water and Alice Munro Short Stories

Alice Munro’s short stories are usually about women and families from a suburban and or rural setting. She discusses topics such as gender roles and interpersonal relationships, usually from a woman’s perspective. What David Foster Wallace’s theory on education can do with this, is that it allows us, the reader, to adjust our perspective, to be sympathetic to the characters. Although I personally am not a girl growing up in a post-WWII Canadian small town, I can still relate to or at least empathise with the characters and their emotions that Munro has created. In Munro’s stories, her characters tend to have personal flaws or defy the tradition character ideals, for example the narrator in “Boys and Girls”, despite her desire to keep her role helping her father and dislike of the role women are designated for in her family, she ends up subconsciously transforming, until she starts to fit the mould of what her family and society says a woman should be. While we, the audience, may expec

Ibo Background Assessment

Note: Written from a non-Ibo person perspective, however the person has knowledge of what the Ibo culture is and what their achievements are and is speaking on behalf of it at the Royal Colonial Institute’s annual dinner. Set in the Late Victorian era, as the assignment suggests. Words in-between this: [ ], are explanations of phrases, and would not be said in the actual speech.             Greetings, Ladies and Gentlemen of the Royal Colonial Institute. As you all know, this is a time of great change in this world. In the span of 100 years we’ve gone from walking on foot and horseback, to being able to get to Edinburgh from London in only 8½ hours whilst sitting, in relative comfort. Despite losing America a century ago, the British Empire has grown immensely since then, acquiring massive territories in Africa. Truly, the Sun never sets on the British Empire. But despite your dominance and hegemony over the world, the human cost of the colonies that form your overseas empire has be

Podcast Assignment

In class we had to do a podcast about an endangered language. My group, Lingo-radio, featuring Azim, Seo Jung, and myself, did a podcast on Romansch, one of the four official languages of Switzerland. We went for a conversational/natural type of podcast, and based our dialogue on bullet-points, rather than a strict script. Here is the file: