[BRIEF NOTE] A note on a couplet of Plath's "Daddy"

[rfmcdonald]

The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through.

This image is striking, combining the rhetoric of family trees with the rhetoric of high technology and showing off the hybrid of the two as diseased and dysfunctional and (as she concludes at the end of Daddy) not enough to keep the narrator alive.