Previous Next

Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.

The Black Shoe

The speaker opens the poem in a somewhat odd way, by addressing a “black shoe”:

     You do not do, you do not do
     Any more, black shoe
     In which I have lived like a foot
     For thirty years, poor and white,
     Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Although at first a bit confounding, it quickly becomes clear that the “black shoe” in this passage is not a literal shoe. Instead, it’s a symbolic reference to the oppressive conditions the speaker has survived “for thirty years.” Just as an ill-fitting shoe might hamper one’s ability to walk, the speaker has been living in conditions that have kept her confined and immobile, “barely daring to breathe or Achoo.” Significantly, the oppressive conditions symbolized by the black shoe connect directly to the speaker’s father. The speaker makes this connection clear in two ways. First, immediately after addressing the shoe in the first stanza, the speaker shifts to address her father in the second stanza. Second, the speaker implies a connection between the blackness of the shoe and a symbolic darkness she associates with her father, who she describes as “a man in black with a Meinkampf look” (line 65). The black shoe therefore symbolizes the oppressiveness of the speaker’s father. And just as the speaker’s ready to “kill” her father, she’s also ready to cast off the black shoe.

The Black Telephone

In lines 69–70, the speaker refers to a mysterious “black telephone”:

     The black telephone’s off at the root,
     The voices just can’t worm through.

This black telephone is symbolically linked to the “black shoe” referenced in the poem’s opening stanza. The black shoe references the oppressive conditions caused by the memory of the speaker’s father. Likewise, the black telephone symbolizes the channel of communication that persists between her and her father long after the latter’s death. As with the shoe, the blackness of the telephone is connected to her father’s fascistic personality and brutish behavior. Yet her image of the telephone is odd in the way it’s conflated with the image of roots passing around and even through her father’s grave. The speaker seems to imagine these roots as a kind of natural wiring system that transmits messages, allowing the voice of her dead father to “worm” its way through to her. Just as the speaker feels prepared to kick off the “black shoe” that has hampered her mobility for thirty years, here she expresses a similar desire to hang up the “black telephone.” Such an act will cut off the line of communication that has terrorized her for so long.

Vampire

In the final stanzas of “Daddy,” the speaker refers to her deceased father as a vampire. According to popular legend, vampires are living corpses who survive in their “undead” state by drinking the blood of the living. The word vampire may also be used in a more colloquial sense, to refer to a person who preys on or otherwise exploits other people by draining them of energy, money, or some other vital resource. The speaker’s father is a vampire in both senses of the word. Though not literally “undead,” his memory continues to haunt the speaker long after his death. In this sense, then, he is symbolically undead. He is an absent presence that continues to drain her of life and inhibit her psychic well-being. As she notes in stanza 12, the speaker was so affected by her father’s memory that she attempted suicide. Nor did his influence wane after her failed attempt. On the contrary, his demon-like power seems only to have grown. It is for this reason that, at the poem’s end, the speaker must free herself by symbolically killing her vampiric father: “There’s a stake in your fat black heart” (line 76).

Previous section Motifs Next section Tone

Take a Study Break