Thursday, December 6, 2012
Introduction to Anne Sexton
Anne Sexton was born in in Newton, Massachusetts, in 1928 and married Alfred Muller Sexton II at age nineteen. Later she moved to both San Francisco and Baltimore were she par took in modeling courses. After the birth of her first daughter Anne was diagnosed with sever postpartum depression, suffered her first mental breakdown, and was admitted to a neuro psychiatric. Anne developed a writing for poetry when she was in high school and her doctor told her that she should pursue her interest for writing again. In 1957 she decided to join a adult education poetry workshop in Boston, this where her poetry started become the center of her life, and started to gain her a mass amount of attention. Where Sextons fame began to peak was after the publishing of "Love Poems," where her voice began to become more critical and less confessional. Anne Sexton wrote fifteen poems before she later committed suicide in 1974 by using carbon monoxide from her car as poison .
Poem: "Her Kind"
"Her Kind" | ||
| by Anne Sexton | ||
 | ||
I have gone out, a possessed witch, haunting the black air, braver at night; dreaming evil, I have done my hitch over the plain houses, light by light: lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind. A woman like that is not a woman, quite. I have been her kind. I have found the warm caves in the woods, filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves, closets, silks, innumerable goods; fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves: whining, rearranging the disaligned. A woman like that is misunderstood. I have been her kind. I have ridden in your cart, driver, waved my nude arms at villages going by, learning the last bright routes, survivor where your flames still bite my thigh and my ribs crack where your wheels wind. A woman like that is not ashamed to die. I have been her kind.
Anne Sexton Reading "Her Kind"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDcARJqtqFs
Katy Robertson
English 242
December 11, 2012
Ms. Wentworth
Anne Sexton Analysis
Anne Sexton was an American poet during the mid 1900s who suffered from mental illness for most of her life. The themes of her poetry usually revolved around topics such as mental illness, depression and death. The poem “Her Kind” is one of Sexton’s more famous poems and one that reflects the kind of woman she was. The speaker in “Her Kind” is Sexton, who is insane, yet able to maintain a sense of reality. At the end of each stanza she says, “I have been her kind”. What she meant is that she closely identified with each type of woman.
In the first stanza she talked about a witch, or some type of powerful woman; someone who was rebellious and had beliefs that went against what society wants us to believe. She was an unnatural woman and did not fit the criteria of what society expected of women. In the second stanza, she talks about the typical type of woman who keeps up with her home and is the caretaker of the family and how she is misunderstood for reasons such as the loss of her independence. She was demonstrating the fact that women were not seen as individuals. They were seen as having no purpose other than being a wife and mother. She was stating the fact that not all women were fond of caring and cooking and cleaning and sacrificing for a family. Of course, that made her an outcast in society. As a woman, she should love her family and love to give up herself and her desires for them. Sexton argued that women like that shouldn’t be labeled as unnatural, but misunderstood. In the third stanza she is talking about a woman, possibly Joan of Arc, who was burned at the stake for trying to be more than what society deemed a woman should be. She said she was “not ashamed to die” because she had lived her life on her own terms. Society may not have agreed with it, but she didn’t care. She celebrated her “unnatural” ability. She showed that if we lived our lives as we see fit, in spite of the backlash we may receive from others, then we may live and die with pride. Sexton’s poem is empowering to women everywhere.
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Poem: "The Truth the Dead Know"
"The Truth the Dead Know"
By: Anne Sexton
For my Mother, born March 1902, died March 1959
and my Father, born February 1900, died June 1959
For my Mother, born March 1902, died March 1959
and my Father, born February 1900, died June 1959
Gone, I say and walk from church,
refusing the stiff procession to the grave,
letting the dead ride alone in the hearse.
It is June. I am tired of being brave.
We drive to the Cape. I cultivate
myself where the sun gutters from the sky,
where the sea swings in like an iron gate
and we touch. In another country people die.
My darling, the wind falls in like stones
from the whitehearted water and when we touch
we enter touch entirely. No one's alone.
Men kill for this, or for as much.
And what of the dead? They lie without shoes
in the stone boats. They are more like stone
than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse
to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.
Anne Sexton Reading "The Truth The Death Know"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkCHYVgXHiQMimi Isaac
English
242
Ms.
Wentworth
December 10, 2012
December 10, 2012
Anne Sexton Poetry Analysis
Anne Sexton suffered from depression
through her childhood and adulthood. Sexton was medically diagnosed with
postpartum depression after the birth of her first daughter. Her poem titled “The
Truth the Dead Know” is a confessional elegy of her parent’s death. The poem is composed of four stanzas with four lines each with end rhyme. This poem
expressed her sadness in dealing with the death of her loved ones.
The caption before the poem reads “For My Mother, Born March 1902, Died March 1959 and My Father, Born February 1900, Died June 1959.”
This sets the background for the poem and gives the reader a direction on how
to read it. Sexton’s mother passed away from cancer and her father passed away
from a lifelong fight against alcoholism. Sexton had a hard time dealing with the
two deaths because they only happened three months apart. It is tough enough to
deal with one death but two in a year is much harder because there is not enough
time to mourn the first one.
The
first word of the poem is “Gone” which is a powerful way of saying that
somebody has passed away (1). This shows a great contrast between life and death.
The line continues “I say and walk from church, refusing the stiff procession to the grave”
(2-3). Sexton’s refusal to go to the grave showed that she had a hard time
admitting that somebody close to her had passed away. Seeing the grave would
make everything too real. Instead, she let
“the dead ride alone in the hearse” because she was “tired of being brave” (3-4). Once again,
this shows the distance between the living and the dead. The poem also states
that it is June, so the reader can convey that this is her father’s funeral.
The
second stanza explains how Sexton tried to deal with the pain. Instead of
attending the funeral, Sexton drives to the Cape where the “sun gutters from
the sky” and where the “sea swings in like an iron gate” (6-7). It shows how nature
is unconcerned with death. There is a sense that the world is moving on with
the cycle of life. The line continues with “we touch. In another country people
die” (8). This line shows that Sexton is actually still close and has a connection
with her dead parents.
The
third stanza continues to stress that for Sexton dead people do not move far
way because through nature she still has a strong connection to them. In the
life after death “No one's alone. Men kill for this, or for as much” (11-12). This
showed that Sexton felt lonely among the living. It also shows that Sexton might feel
more connected with the dead because she can still touch them after they have passed away.
Sexton references the stone sea and stone boats because they show a connection
to her cold emotions towards the death of her parents. The dead are just shoeless
corpses in a coffin. The last line reads “They refuse to be blessed…” which
shows just how senseless dead people are (15-16). Also, the fact that not even
religion can answer for the pain she feels.
Sexton
suffered from severe depression throughout her life. Much of her unhappiness accumulated
from her childhood to adulthood. She was so emotionally and spiritually numb that in a sense she became dead like her parents. In the poem, Sexton could
even enter their world and touch her mother and father after their death. This
comes to show that she was severely depressed and could never move on from their
death. Since nothing could bring the dead back, in a way she slowly went to
them, hence the title “The Truth the Dead Know.” In the life of Anne Sexton there
was more of a connection between her and the dead.
Poem: "Wanting to Die"
Wanting to Die
Since you ask, most days I cannot remember.
I walk in my clothing, unmarked by that voyage.
Then the almost unnameable lust returns.
Even then I have nothing against life.
I know well the grass blades you mention,
the furniture you have placed under the sun.
But suicides have a special language.
Like carpenters they want to know which tools.
They never ask why build.
Twice I have so simply declared myself,
have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy,
have taken on his craft, his magic.
In this way, heavy and thoughtful,
warmer than oil or water,
I have rested, drooling at the mouth-hole.
I did not think of my body at needle point.
Even the cornea and the leftover urine were gone.
Suicides have already betrayed the body.
Still-born, they don’t always die,
but dazzled, they can’t forget a drug so sweet
that even children would look on and smile.
To thrust all that life under your tongue!—
that, all by itself, becomes a passion.
Death’s a sad bone; bruised, you’d say,
and yet she waits for me, year after year,
to so delicately undo an old wound,
to empty my breath from its bad prison.
Balanced there, suicides sometimes meet,
raging at the fruit a pumped-up moon,
leaving the bread they mistook for a kiss,
leaving the page of the book carelessly open,
something unsaid, the phone off the hook
and the love whatever it was, an infection.
A Reading "Wanting to Die" Wanting to Die
Hailey Kastetter
Wentworth
12/10/2012
“Wanting
to Die”
Anne
Sexton was an American poet who suffered from severe postpartum syndrome with
the birth of her first daughter. During this time she wrote many poems that
could be related back to her illness. “Wanting to Die” would be a prime
example. This poem goes beyond many different reasons on why she wanted to end
her own life, even though her own life had so much to offer and she had her own
family. Anne Sexton introduced this very problem in this poem to make the
reader understand that she was not a happy person.
In the first stanza for her poem she is simply talking
about how she is so severely depressed that she cannot get a grip on what is
going on in her life, and why she is living day to day where everything seems
to be the same, in so much pain and sorrow.
“The furniture you have placed under the sun,” is a example of
everything that she has in her life, Her family, friends, job, and accommodations
that come along in everyday life. So why is she so willing to take her own
life? She even mentions herself that the depression she had is a drug because
she is trying so hard to control her own fate that the effects are starting to
now feel real. Anne Sexton has driven herself into a lie and addiction that she
now has no control over. For example in stanza four when she talks about the
enemy and how she has destroyed everything around her.In reality this is
basically Anne Sexton’s suicide note. She has a very controversial tone and this
poem is almost like she has reflected the analysis back on herself. In the end
she talks about how the happiness and excitement to take one’s own life can be
very powerful but then in the beginning of the poem she went on to say how she
had lack of control. I think Anne was not only confused at this time of her
life, but she definitely knew where she wanted to go with her life, and that
place didn’t exist in the living world.
A Reading "Wanting to Die" Wanting to Die
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