Plath's Daddy's Shock "Daddy" is one of Plath's most anthologized poems (along with "Lady Lazarus"). It's a notorious poem, one once compared to George Steiner's "Guernica." Its imagery and audacity still shocks, so much so that I don't even know if it's taught, anthologized, or even taught; it's almost as if the critical world has had its say and moved on, either to other Ariel poems or to other books altogether, like The Colossus or Crossing the Water. It has become a modern classic, of a kind, the kind of people (not those here, of course!) who sigh and remember fondly what they read when they were younger, or had to to read in certain places. point, dutifully used it in an essay, then put it back on the shelf when the class was over. “Daddy” is a nasty, brutal poem, but at its heart it's about grief, loss, and what happens when grief is blocked. I have always considered this to be the real subject, this desire to forgive his father, to forgive himself, to understand and to accept - which was locked away, denied, as part of his childhood, his adolescence, until when she is 21 years old and she visits (I take her literally) her father's grave for the first time. (The essence of this poem lies in the fact that she does not believe that her father is dead, and since she never went to his funeral, or even visited his grave as a child, the father is in strange limbo, a zombie figure.) In 1959 she visited him. her father's grave and was tempted, oddly as she says, to dig him up and prove to herself that he was really dead. In the poem, she just wants to be with her father (in the reading, her voice definitely becomes emotional as she remembers her childhood with him), or someone like him, but it never works; in the end she turns on him, but, as Stewart says, she can never be "done" - I think, because this sadness is put aside again, "the voices" (her father, her husband, his mother?) who could still be able to talk to him and listen to him are gone. Her father is still there, just as solid and historical as he was in "The Colossus", and just as misunderstood/bloated (two ways blocked grief seems to work).