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“Daddy” has a structure that’s characteristic of much lyric poetry. Lyric poems are driven less by highly organized arguments and instead tend to follow the speaker’s thoughts and feelings as they shift in real time. Likewise, “Daddy” follows the thoughts and feelings of the speaker as she contemplates her deceased father and the oppressive influence his memory continues to exert on her psyche. The poem opens with the speaker addressing a shoe, though this shoe seems to represent the stifling conditions created by her father’s memory. In the second and third stanzas, the speaker moves on to address her late father directly, and she admits, “I used to pray to recover you” (line 14). Subsequent stanzas follow the speaker as she recovers memories of her father and the fear he sparked in her as a child. In stanzas 4–11, the speaker reflects on the fact that her German father had a fascistic personality that left her feeling terrorized. His brutality causes her to liken him to a Nazi. Even more controversially, it causes her to compare her own suffering to that of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

Following these middle stanzas, where heightened emotions lead to exaggeration, the speaker shifts away from Nazi imagery and describes the longing she felt for her father after his passing:

     I was ten when they buried you.   
     At twenty I tried to die
     And get back, back, back to you.
     I thought even the bones would do.

In these lines (57–60), the speaker indicates that she attempted suicide at the age of twenty, exactly ten years after her father’s death. She claims she did it out of a desire to reunite with him, which implies that she suffered from unresolved grief after his passing. However, the speaker makes another dramatic turn in the poem’s final stanzas. She describes the psychological torture she experienced in the aftermath of her suicide attempt, and in lines 64–67 she clearly associates this torture with her father:

     I made a model of you,
     A man in black with a Meinkampf look

     And a love of the rack and the screw.
     And I said I do, I do.

In other words, the speaker’s father became her torturer, and it’s for this reason that she concludes the poem by expressing a need to break free of his influence. Like a blood-sucking vampire who remains alive even after death, the oppressive memory of her father drains her. She must therefore drive “a stake [into his] fat black heart” (line 76) in the hopes of exorcising his lingering presence.

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