Sylvia Plath - Quotes

 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.



Daddy, I have had to kill you.

You died before I had time---

Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,

Ghastly statue with one grey toe[1]

Big as a Frisco seal



And a head in the freakish Atlantic

When it pours bean green over blue

In the waters of beautiful Nauset.[2]

I used to pray to recover you.

Ach, du.[3]



In the German tongue, in the Polish town[4]

Scraped flat by the roller

Of wars, wars, wars.

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.



It stuck in a barb wire snare.

Ich, ich, ich, ich,[5]

I could hardly speak.

I thought every German was you.

And the language obscene



An engine, an engine

Chuffing me off like a Jew.

A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.[6]

I began to talk like a Jew.

I think I may well be a Jew.



The snows of the Tyrol,[7] the clear beer of Vienna

Are not very pure or true.

With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck

And my Taroc[8] pack and my Taroc pack

I may be a bit of a Jew.



I have always been scared of you,

With your Luftwaffe,[9] your gobbledygoo.

And your neat mustache

And your Aryan eye, bright blue.

Panzer[10]-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

Brute heart of a brute like you.



You stand at the blackboard, daddy,

In the picture I have of you,

A cleft in your chin instead of your foot

But no less a devil for that, no not

And less the black man who



Bit my pretty red heart in two.

I was ten when they buried you.

At twenty I tried to die

And get back, back, back to you.

I thought even the bones would do.



But they pulled me out of the sack,

And they stuck me together with glue.[11]

And then I knew what to do.

I made a model of you,

A man in black with a Meinkampf look[12]



And a love of the rack and the screw.

And I said I do, I do.

So daddy, I 

Tags: daddy   onomatopoeia   prose   rhythm     


Ring Lardner Jr. - Quotes

 Are you lost daddy I arsked tenderly. Shut up he explained. 

Tags: daddy     


Quotes of the Day

RECENT MEMBERS

all recent members

POPULAR MEMBERS

all popular members