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The tone of “Daddy” has two layers: it’s at once defiant and grief-stricken. On the surface, the speaker strikes a defiant pose that explicitly rejects her father’s memory and his ongoing influence on her life. She makes this clear early in the poem, when she states: “Daddy, I have had to kill you” (line 6). The speaker reaffirms this defiant stance when she concludes the poem with an aggressive gesture of rejection: “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through” (line 80). However, beneath the surface of this defiance there lies a deeper sense of grief. Yet the speaker’s grief is complex. On the one hand, she grieves her father’s death. As she notes in lines 57–59, she made a suicide attempt in an effort to reunite with him:

     I was ten when they buried you.   
     At twenty I tried to die
     And get back, back, back to you.

But on the other hand, the speaker’s grief also stems from the trauma she sustained because of her father’s fascistic personality. The intensity of the speaker’s fear leads her to figure herself as a “Jew” at the mercy of a Nazi “panzer-man” (line 45). Arguably, the speaker’s intensely defiant tone offers her a way to process her deeper and more complex feelings of grief.

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