“Daddy” has no fixed setting. The speaker never names the place from which she narrates, and the images she uses are products of her own mind. The geographical points she names are settings for specific metaphors. For example, the head of the giant, broken statue in stanzas 2 and 3 has fallen in “the waters off beautiful Nauset” (13), a beach on Cape Cod. And though she attempts to name the specific Polish town from which her father hails, she cannot locate that town with any precision. “The name of the town is common” (19), she says. “So I could never tell where you / Put your foot, your root” (22-23). Not only is she unable to signify that town and therefore her father’s origin, she suspects the town has been destroyed by “wars, wars, wars” (18).

The metaphorical universe of the poem extends from the United States to Europe, and...