The poem "Daddy" thus chronicles a personal misery that is shared by all of Europe, bleeding its collective wounds of guilt at the end of World War II. This sense of the personal and the impersonal becoming melded into poetry is what gives "Daddy" its power. Everyone, not just everyone with a personal, historical family connection to the Holocaust can understand the speaker. She is everywoman, and perhaps everyone who has had a self-defeating, masochistic relationship with someone in the present, because she or he is still emotionally living in the past, replaying an old childhood drama.

Plath's complicated relationship with parenting, and her inability to fully trust or inhabit a healthy relationship is also seen in "Morning Song," which depicts a mother rising to comfort a crying baby. Unlike the relationship of "Daddy," the mother and child seem to have a normal bond -- the mother wakes to comfort...
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