“Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.”
— Sylvia Plath, Daddy (1962)
Context
Written 12 October 1962, one month after Plath's separation from Ted Hughes and four months before her death; first published posthumously in the 1965 collection Ariel. The poem is a confessional exorcism addressed to Plath's father Otto, a German immigrant and biology professor who died when she was eight, and whom the late stanzas conflate with the husband who has just left her. Across sixteen stanzas the speaker indicts the father in escalating metaphors — black shoe, marble statue, swastika, vampire — before pronouncing the closing line that severs the relation.
How the repetition works
Plath's epizeuxis is the catalogue's first deployment of the figure as childhood vocabulary turned against its referent. Every other adjacent-word example here — Tennyson's 'Break, break, break,' Thomas's 'rage, rage,' Coleridge's 'alone, alone' — repeats a verb or sensory noun; Plath repeats 'Daddy,' a nursery-register endearment, so the second iteration travels the exact same phonetic distance as the first but lands on different ground because the comma between them has been loaded with 'you bastard.' The figure performs a semantic reversal in zero metrical time — the identical word means opposite things by the time the second utterance is over — which is a use of epizeuxis the rest of this catalogue does not contain.