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“Daddy” doesn’t have a specific, concrete setting. Instead, the poem unfolds through a series of thoughts and recollections about different people and places. For this reason, it makes sense to think of the poem as being set in an abstracted psychological landscape that emerges from the speaker’s mind. The speaker does make several references to specific times and places. In the third stanza, for instance, she mentions “the waters off beautiful Nauset” (line 13), which refers to a beach on the Massachusetts coast. The speaker also makes numerous references throughout the poem to Nazi Germany in the period leading up to and including World War II.

Although Massachusetts and Germany are concrete places, it wouldn’t make sense to say that to poem is set in either. This is because what matters more than the actual places is the emotional qualities that these places evoke in the speaker. Whereas she seems to have positive childhood associations with Nauset Beach, the imagery drawn from Nazi Germany clearly reflects negative associations she has with her father and his German heritage. In this way, the places mentioned in the poem constitute a psychological rather than a physical landscape.

Next section Themes

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