Daddy Themes

"Daddy" is not only an exploration of the speaker's relationship with her father and husband, but of women's relationships with men in general. It was written in the 1960s, a time when feminists fo...

The speaker of "Daddy" is obsessed with mortality – her father's mortality, and her own. When the speaker's father dies, she sees killing herself as a way to become reunited with him. She als...

As we noted under the mortality theme, "Daddy" is addressed to someone who is dead, which already makes the poem pretty supernatural. But it goes even further: there are vampires, devils, and a sta...

The speaker of "Daddy" is addressing her dead father, who she had problems talking to even when he was alive. Maybe this is because he was a German immigrant and couldn't speak English well, or may...

Throughout "Daddy," the speaker is trapped by memories of her father. In the first stanza, she says that she feels she's been living like a foot in a shoe, a metaphor for the confinement that she's...