Poem: "Wanting to Die"

Wanting to Die

BY ANNE SEXTON

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.

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