Daddy Summary

The speaker creates a figurative image of her father, using many different metaphors to describe her relationship with him. He's like a black shoe that she's had to live in; like a statue that stretches across the United States; like God; like a Nazi; like a Swastika; and, finally, like a vampire. The speaker, faced with her father as a giant and evil Nazi, takes the part of a Jew and a victim.

Yet, with this poem, the speaker gets her revenge, claiming that she's killed both her father and the man she made as a model of her father – her husband. This poem shows her struggle to declare that, no matter how terrible her father was and how much he remains in her mind, she is now through with him.