Loss and Trauma in Plath's DaddyIn addition to anger and violence, "Daddy" is also imbued with a strong sense of loss and trauma. The repeated “You don’t” in the first sentence suggests that the speaker is still struggling with a truth that she has recently been forced to accept. After all, this is the same character who, in an earlier poem, spends his hours trying to rebuild the broken pieces of his "colossus" father. After 30 years of work, she admits to not being “wiser” and “married to the shadows”, but she remains faithful to her vocation. With “Papa,” not only is the futility of his earlier efforts recognized, but the conditions that imposed them on him are maniacally denounced. At the same time, and this seems to fuel her fury, she admits that she herself was deliberately deceived. The father she previously associated with “Oresteia” and the “Roman Forum” is now revealed as a Meinkampf-looking panzer. But she doesn't stop at her own complicity. “Every woman,” she announces, “loves the fascists/The boot in the face, the brute/The raw heart of ...