Uncomfortable (in)appropriations: ‘Daddy’ and ‘The Great War’

We can plant a memory garden/Say a solemn prayer, place a poppy in my hair

The first bonus track of Taylor Swift’s 2022 album Midnights – featuring on the ‘3am edition’ – is titled ‘The Great War’. I remember listening to it in my kitchen as I stacked the dishwasher, an act of quotidian mundanity incongruously soundtracked by Swift’s passionate hymning of a relationship that, against the odds, survives a ‘great war’ of miscommunication, paranoia, distrust and past trauma only to come out stronger: ‘I vowed I would always be yours/’Cause we survived the Great War’. It features a veritable litany of figurative language in which love becomes a battle, heartbreak becomes death, emotional wounds literal bruises. So far, so Swift. But when the song reached the bridge, where Swift sings the lines, ‘We can plant a memory garden/Say a solemn prayer, place a poppy in my hair’, I felt an uneasiness kicking in. I recognised it as a very specific kind of uneasiness, because I had felt it precisely once before.

For a decade of my life, I taught an English Literature summer school every July and August in the heart of Bloomsbury, London, to bright, enthusiastic teenagers aspiring to be English literature undergraduates at Britain’s best universities. (If that sounds like a teacher’s dream, you can be assured that it absolutely was; I still cherish those memories fondly, and take – entirely unfoundedly – a tiny bit of credit for the fact that one of my former students ended up a star on the Great British Bake Off). One of the poems we covered was ‘Daddy’, written by American poet Sylvia Plath in 1962, shortly before her death by suicide.

In the poem, Plath addresses her complicated relationships with both her deceased father and her ex-husband, poet Ted Hughes, to whom she refers as ‘The vampire who said he was you/And drank my blood for a year/Seven years if you want to know’. After reading the poem aloud with my students, with its lines such as,

I have always been scared of you,

With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.   

And your neat mustache

And your Aryan eye, bright blue.

Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You——

Not God but a swastika

So black no sky could squeak through.   

Every woman adores a Fascist,   

The boot in the face, the brute   

Brute heart of a brute like you.

I was completely unprepared for the – now, I realise, entirely logical and anticipatable – question asked by several students. Always of the opinion that it’s better, as a teacher, to admit when you don’t know something rather than blag it (‘Let’s look it up together!’), I found myself frantically googling, ‘Was Otto Plath a Nazi?’

The short answer is: no. The longer answer is a little more nuanced, especially since the 2012 discovery of FBI files on Otto Plath that noted his ‘morbid disposition’ and pro-German sympathies (he was of German descent, emigrating to America at 15). The general consensus, however, is that Plath’s references to ‘Panzer-man’, ‘Fascist’ and ‘devil’ allude to her troubled relationship with the father who died when she was eight years old (not ten, as she says in the poem, perhaps an indicator that we are meant to envisage some distance between the poetic persona and Plath herself), and to her own personal issues with grief, abandonment, and – if you’re that way inclined – an Electra complex. The frequent repetition and assonance of ‘ooo’ sounds, coupled with the choice of childlike vocabulary – ‘Daddy’, ‘pretty red heart’, ‘Achoo’ – present a vision of residual childhood trauma, straddling uncomfortably the world of nursery rhyme and adult confessional. In order to express the problematic power dynamic between her young self and the man who left her ‘Barely daring to breathe or Achoo’, Plath presents herself as the Jewish victim to Otto’s Nazi:

An engine, an engine

Chuffing me off like a Jew.

A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.   

I began to talk like a Jew.

I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna   

Are not very pure or true.

With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck   

And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack

I may be a bit of a Jew.

This was the part where my students, and I, started to get somewhat uncomfortable. We read this poem alongside Paul Celan’s Todesfugue (Death Fugue), published in 1948 and written about his personal experience, as a Romanian-born Jew, of a concentration camp. It is punctuated by references to ‘black milk’, a deeply unsettling image that – with its implications of tainted maternal nourishment – evokes the same lost innocence as in Plath’s poem, but in a very different context. Alongside the sickening imagery of this particular poem, which we know was grounded in the horrors of real life experience (Celan’s own, and that of his parents, who died in concentration camps), Plath’s figurative utilisation of the Jew/Nazi relationship to express a troubled longing for the father she never really knew seems deeply inappropriate. Referring to her relationship with (also-not-a-Nazi) Hughes as ‘ma[king] a model of you/A man in black with a Meinkampf look’ certainly captures the destructive traits of a relationship we know to have been deeply troubled. But an ethical question seems to raise its head here, as we read the unflinching lines of ‘Daddy’. Is it really acceptable to appropriate the suffering and murder of approximately six million people in order to articulate one’s Daddy issues?

I found myself asking a similar question, prompted by a similar (though milder) unease, in response to Swift’s ‘The Great War’. While the deployment of war and battle as metaphors for love is hardly new (we can trace such comparisons back to at least Chaucer, and they are a key feature of the English sonnet as popularised by Wyatt, Sidney and Shakespeare in the sixteenth century), there is something about the specificity of Swift’s usage – one particular war, with its particular, unmistakable iconography – that, to use the title of another Swift song, ‘hits different’. (That said, the iconography is somewhat muddled – the reference to drawing curtains closed and drinking poison all alone seems to allude to the suicide of Hitler’s wife, Eva Braun, during the Second World War). While the mentions of bloodshed, bruised knuckles, tombs and banners are generic enough (indeed, she uses the latter two in ‘Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve’, also on Midnights, to express her bitterness towards an ex-lover), it’s the line about placing a poppy in her hair that resonates somewhat uncomfortably. To compare the salvaging of a tempestuous relationship to memorialising the millions of soldiers who died in hideous conditions in the trenches is jarring in a way I haven’t felt before with Swift’s copiously figurative writing. 

Yet, as I discussed with my students after reading ‘Daddy’, perhaps that jarring is the point. If the only way to convey the depths of one’s pain is to reach for an entirely inappropriate, even shocking, comparison, then maybe one has done what one set out to do (although, of course, we try not to spend too much time thinking about authorial intention; I’m only speculating here). Maybe if we feel so bruised and broken that we are unable to scream our pain even into the void – the ‘tongue stuck in [our] jaw’, ‘stuck in a barb wire snare’, to quote Plath again – then we are forced to go to the extreme, clawing our way towards a comparison that will make others sit up and take notice. It is both a literal, and a figurative, cry for help; in Plath’s case made all the more poignant by the knowledge that several months later she would take her own life. Maybe the Jew comparison is intentionally absurd: Plath’s way of saying that these are the depths to which patriarchal neglect has driven her. Only able to speak about herself using hedging language – ‘I may be’; ‘I think I may be’ – her self identity is just as fragmented as it was when ‘at twenty I tried to die […] But they pulled me out of the sack/And they stuck me together with glue.’

Perhaps it’s not such a stretch from our common parlance about heartbreak – which, if we probe the metaphor, is grisly and hyperbolic – to the kinds of momentary impersonations Plath and Swift adopt in ‘Daddy’ and ‘The Great War’. As anyone who has experienced the pain of loss will know, it drives us to extreme comparisons in an attempt to articulate the invisible and intangible, to give some voiceable shape to the crushing vacuum in our gut. It can feel like – to use another Swift metaphor – ‘Death by a Thousand Cuts’, each once convincing us that no one in the world has ever felt like this before; yet we still long to reach out and compare our pain with others’, to feel less desperately alone by launching ourselves into a fraught pool of communal suffering. Perhaps, in the spirals of a crisis precipitated by grief and loss, it seems only logical to urge the world to wake up to our violent hurt by reaching for the most catastrophic analogy we can muster, even if it does entail the problematic appropriation of historical pain. 

Can you think of any other examples of the above in literature or music? Should it make us feel uncomfortable? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.