Daddy (poem) - Structure and Form

Structure and Form

The poem repeats in quintains with meter and rhyme scheme resembling the style and structure of a nursery-rhyme:

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.

Sylvia Plath, introducing the poem for a BBC radio reading shortly before her suicide, famously described the poem as about "a girl with an Electra complex. Her father died while she thought he was God.". Coupled with morbid imagery, the narrator's childlike intonation evokes a keen state of unease in the reader throughout the poem, climaxing in the final line "Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through".