By this line it is clear that Plath's father has been very powerful and impressive to her. She continues to describe her father as a "Ghastly statue with one gray toe- (line 9). These images reveal Plath's struggle to cope with his death that only reflects her father's goodness and purity towards her. She was tired of dealing with her abandonment issues and was ready to get rid of the controlling memory of her deceased father. One can see this from the beginning of the poem when Plath writes, " You do not do, you not do/ Any more, black shoe/ In which I have lived like a foot- (lines 1-3). When she identifies herself as a foot, "she suggests that she is trapped- (Uroff). The images themselves are important for what they tell us of "her sense of being victimized and victimizer but more significant the actual image is the swift ease with which she can turn in to various uses- (Uroff). For example, "she starts out imagining herself .
as a prisoner living like a foot in the black shoe of her father. Then she casts her .
father in her own role and he becomes "one grey toe/ Big as Frisco seal- and .
then quickly she is looking for his foot, his root. Next he reverts to his .
originally boot identity, and she is the one with "The boot in the face."" And .
immediately he returns with "A cleft in your chin instead of your foot."" At the .
end she sees the villagers stamping on him- (Uroff).
Thus she moves from being booted to being a booter as her father reverses the direction. Plath can control her terrors by creating images, "but she seems to have no understanding of the confusion her wild image-making betrays- (Uroff).
In the second stanza Plath talks about her father's death and when she says, "I have had to kill you- (line 6), she means that she had to try to forget her memories of him because most of them were good and it only leaves her saddened.
