Lines 16-19: “the Polish town / Scraped flat by the roller / Of wars, wars, wars. / But the name of the town is common.” Lines 31-33: “An engine, an engine / Chuffing me off like a Jew. / A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.” The Bag Daddy is made from high quality, waterproofed cotton canvas and has a leather finish. It is beautiful and stylish, designed for modern parents. She saw it on the news last night after Neighbours and fish fingers. Heard the fear slipping through the receiver, saw it oozing from Dad’s eyeballs and into the living room as he tried to phone home.

Lines 41-46: “I have always been scared of / you, / With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo. / And your neat mustache / And your Aryan eye, bright blue. / Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You— / Not God but a swastika” In this same broadcast, she giggles at the end of the poem when the narrator’s “father” ultimately dies. Given that the father in this poem represents the oppressive societal structure women like Plath sought to overcome. Granola bar. This is for you, especially if you have a newborn. You’re already sleep deprived, and you still have to eat too, dad. Plath, a forerunner of Second Wave Feminism that developed in the 1960s believed the discrimination of women at the hands of men in the middle of the 20th century was similar to the oppression the Jews faced against the Nazis. This can be seen in how Plath expresses sympathy and identification with Jews and their suffering. A famous Jewish comparative literature professor at Yale, Harold Bloom, was notoriously offended by Plath’s use of the Holocaust as a literary metaphor. Others, such as Seamus Heaney, have criticized her ‘gratuitous’ references to the Holocaust in his wake: Here is a poem spoken by a girl with an Electra complex. Her father died while she thought he was God. Her case is complicated by the fact that her father was also a Nazi and her mother very possibly part Jewish. In the daughter the two strains marry and paralyze each other – she has to act out the awful little allegory once over before she is free of it.Otto Plath died of untreated gangrene caused by diabetes when Plath was eight years old. She was never, therefore, able to resolve her feelings or come to terms with their problematic relationship. Some have applied a Freudian interpretation of this poem, analysing it in terms of an ‘Electra Complex’. Whatever analyses one applies the poem can be read in terms of Plath’s desire to come to terms with her feelings about her father. Lines 41-45: “I have always been scared of / you, / With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo. / And your neat mustache / And your Aryan eye, bright blue. / Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You—”

In an introduction written for a BBC broadcast of the poem in 1962, Plath described the poem as follows:Operation Desert Storm; you won’t lose a wink of sleep over it. Except your Daddy. Your Daddy’s shitting his pants. Enjoy your Viennetta.’