Language in Plath's DaddyThe speaker of "Daddy" could be seen as our collective inner child, the voice of a world that has "fallen a long way." There is an implicit gain in the poem – of catharsis, of liberation – but “Daddy” is fundamentally a poem about loss. The speaker has finally and irremediably disillusioned herself with the idea of ​​a “rediscovered” childhood, with the dream of the “waters of beautiful Nauset”. There is no going back to an illusory idyllic existence, no way to reconstruct this "pretty red heart": the first oppressor in this poem is the unrealized past ("You died before I had the time... " ). The poem illustrates this in its form, the sound of the nursery rhyme, the ooh, ooh, ooh of the final rhymes, so shocking in contrast to its substance, its images of stark brutality. Childhood and innocence are corrupted here by the inevitable internalization of “wars, wars, wars”. Conventional images have suffered desecration: “Not God but a swastika”; not the father but the devil; not a husband but a vampire. Language, rather than a means of connection, has become an obstacle, enclosing the self ("Tongue stuck in my jaw. / It's stuck in a barbed wire trap. Ich, ich, ich, ich.. .”). a conveyor of images, is itself the subject of this poem – the “foot” of the third line is as much metric as metaphorical, one could say. Plath's “Colossus,” her apprenticeship in the Western poetic tradition, with this poem, is cast into the “weird Atlantic,” just another rejected oppressor. The language of this world has transported the speaker to a place of horrors: “obscene” is “An engine, an engine / I mock like a Jew.” / A Jew in Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.” In this sense, Plath's much-criticized appropriation of Holocaust imagery must be seen as subsequent to the appropriation of that imagery by her – and, by extension, by all of us. Plath demonstrates in this poem that the horrors of history are fundamentally personal, that human history is simply personal! history in the broad sense, that the brutalities of the time influence every childhood, that the notion of innocence is an imposture, a game of cowboys and Indians, to use a less loaded analogy, against the backdrop of Piste Tears.