The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.
The sound of both poems, and particularly "Daddy," is compelling, mesmerizing, and finally, frightening. In them, Plath creates most successfully the new kind of poetic effect she was striving for in her last months, an effect she discusses in the interview with Peter Orr of the British Council.
THE INTERVIEW begins rather inauspiciously, with Orr asking in the stiffest of BBC manners, "Sylvia"--pause--"what started you writing poetry?" But Plath soon takes control of the situation, her conversational voice a little tamer than her reading voice but her imperious, arrogant manner just as fascinating and repellent. She sounds much older than 30 somehow, as if she had reached the last of the nine lives she endows herself with in "Lady Lazarus."
Much of the interview is quite revealing and its appearance on this record is particularly appropriate, because in it Plath talks about the importance of reading poetry, and particularly her recent poetry, aloud. "I have found myself having to read these poems aloud to myself," she tells Orr. "My first book, The Colossus, I can't read any of the poems aloud now. I didn't write them to be read aloud. In fact, they quite privately bore me." Later, Plath seems to be intrigued by the idea of oral poetry:
I feel that the development of recording poems...is a wonderful thing. I'm very excited about it. In a sense, there's a return, isn't there, to the old role of the poet, which was to speak to a group of people, to come across.
Orr: Or to sing to a group of people.
Plath: To sing to a group of people--exactly, exactly.
Plath's song is a dirge, difficult and painful to listen to, but painfully beautiful as well. In those last feverish months of her life, it's extraordinarily fortunate that someone managed to entrap the white hot sparks that Plath was sending off with such dangerously lavish intensity. Now those sparks have at last been released, and Sylvia Plath can "come across" to her audience as she really intended.