Title: The Complete Poems
Author: Anne Sexton
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Publication Year: 1981
ISBN: 0395329353
Rating: 4 stars
It’s hard to believe that April and National Poetry Month are almost over! I’m closing out my poetry reads for the month with this behemoth of a book. At over 600 pages, this tome includes all of Anne Sexton’s poetry, including works that were not yet finished and edited at the time of her death that were published posthumously. Reading and processing 600 pages of poetry was a much more difficult task than I anticipated, but this was a great way to close out poetry month!
Anne Sexton was an American poet who wrote in the 1950s-1970s. Her first collection of poetry was published in 1960. Sexton had bipolar disorder, and as a result, was hospitalized a few times, notably when she experienced postpartum depression after the birth of each of her daughters. After multiple non-fatal suicide attempts throughout her life, Sexton completed suicide in 1974. During her life she wrote, edited, and published eight collections of poetry and two more were edited by her daughter Linda and published posthumously. Despite Sexton’s relatively short career, she was a prolific writer. Sexton is known for her bold work. Her poetry was heavily autobiographical and dealt with taboo issues for her time such as infidelity, abortion, death, mental illness, divorce, and child sexual abuse. While other male poets were writing about some of the same issues, Sexton received more criticism for covering some of the same topics because she was a woman.
The thing that sticks out to me the most about this collection is that when you read a poet’s entire life’s work in one go, the common themes across their oeuvre really stand out. For Sexton, these include: Christian theology, losing her mother to cancer, a complicated relationship with her father, mental illness, being a mother, the color green, and repeated food items (grapes, eggs, meat, etc.), and sexuality. She melds these themes together in unique ways to create brutally honest poetry about what she saw as the big issues in her life.
While Sexton lived what seemed a somewhat conventional life for a woman of her time: married and a mother of two in a Massachusetts suburb, many of her poems are scathing critiques of what it is to be a woman. They are condemnations of the pressure on women to look a certain way by dressing for the male gaze (“Woman with Girdle”). They push back against the suffocation of having to construct a whole life around domestic needs and serving husbands and children (“Housewife” and “Consorting with Angels”). It’s a condemnation of forcing women into the roles of angels of the household.
I had read some of Sexton’s work as a teenager, but I also missed out on a lot of the explicit sexual content of her work. In poems like “You All Know The Story of the Other Woman” and “For My Lover, Returning to His Wife” she explores the interactions of love and sex and sex without love. Specifically in both of these poems, the speaker plays the role of the “Other Woman” who is having an affair with a married man, who despite cheating still loves his wife and will eventually return to her. It seems common in our society to demonize this Other Woman instead of the man who chooses to cheat, but Sexton turns that on its head. Her Other Woman understands that he will go back to his wife and while saddened by it, encourages it and knows it needs to happen. Other sexual poems deal with sex and desire in long term relationships as well as sexual violence that can occur in relationships. Some of the poems that deal with sexual violence are a little less clear and explicit than the other ones and require some inferences and reading between the lines.
I’ve said in previous posts that because of my Catholic education, I really like when there are Christian allusions and parallels in writing. I believe Sexton was raised Protestant and later in life, Sexton became really interested in Catholicism and learned a lot about it. This constant thinking, learning, and searching comes through in a lot of her work. One of my favorites is “Noon Walk on the Asylum Lawn” in which the words of Psalm 23 are interspersed with images the speaker sees on a walk around the grounds of a mental hospital. The images are paranoid and imbued with fear and an overall sinister air, which clashes with the comfort and protection assured in the Psalm. I know this Psalm is often recited at funerals and other times of fear and loss, so it is fitting in terms of meaning, but still a jarring juxtaposition. Another example I especially liked was in “Jesus Summons Forth” in which Sexton writes:
"Lazarus was likely in heaven, as dead as a pear and the very same light green color" (341).
First here you have the reference to Lazarus, a man Jesus brought back from the dead. The focus of that story in the Bible is, of course, the miracle of Jesus restoring Lazarus to life after he had been dead for several days. However, here Sexton focuses on a different aspect. If you believe Christian theology, Lazarus likely went on to Heaven after death. Would being restored back to life on Earth not be a punishment after tasting the perfection of heaven? Second, we see the unique way Sexton uses food and references the color green. When picked, fruit is technically dead and soon after begins the process of rotting. Describing Lazarus as dead as a pear and the same color of green emphasizes to me how he was restored to an Earthly body that had been dead for a while. It was likely beginning to rot already. If Jesus can resurrect the dead, he likely can reverse the decomposition of the body, but it does seem to me like here Sexton is really questioning who this miracle was miraculous for.
In terms of the references to food, Sexton also alludes to food a lot in a way that I found unusual. In “Rumpelstiltskin,” she writes
"There once was a miller with a daughter as lovely as a grape... Poor grape with no one to pick Luscious and round and sleek" (233-234).
When the miller’s daughter becomes queen and bears the king’s baby, Sexton says, “He was like most new babies, / as ugly as an artichoke” (235). In “Hurry Up Please It’s Time” (a line from Eliot’s “The Waste-Land,” one of my favorite poems) she writes
"Once upon a time we were all born, popped out like jelly rolls forgetting our fishdom, the pleasuring seas, the country of comfort, spanked into the oxygens of death" (392).
I don’t think I would have thought of any of these food metaphors on my own, and upon first reading they kind of distracted me and stuck out as odd, but the thing I really like about them is that when I took a moment to sit with them and think about them, they made sense. They are apt. I’m not exactly sure why Sexton picks food instead of anything else, but I think it is because of the nature of food. Much of Sexton’s work deals with the themes of life and death and the slow decay toward death that is living (if you choose to take that view). We can see that in the last line above where she talks about the baby being spanked into the oxygens of death—as soon as we take our first breaths, we begin to die. Similarly, as soon as food is produced, it slowly starts to go bad. Fruit rots, jelly rolls would go stale and mold. Yet, eating food one of the things that sustains our life and prolongs it. I think that is why she uses food metaphors.
My favorite poem in the collection was called “Clothes.” The poem starts with “Put on a clean shirt / before you die, some Russian said” (380) and so Sexton talks about what clothes she would want to die in to meet God. She picks the hat she was married in, her painting shirt “spotted with every yellow kitchen I’ve painted,” her padded black bra, her maternity skirt, and white cotton underwear “the briefs of my childhood.” In this way, she sums up all the important parts of her life and the kind of feelings and memories she wants to take with her into the afterlife. While this poem is still a little bleak and deals with death, it overall felt more happy and nostalgic to me than a lot of her other poems dealing with the same topics. It made me wonder what I’d want to take with me from this life into the next and how clothes are part of those memories.
If you were ever on Tumblr, you are probably familiar with what might be one of Sexton’s most famous quotes: “It is June. I am tired of being brave” (49). This line is from the poem “The Truth the Dead Know,” a poem Sexton dedicated to her mother and father who died in March and June of 1959 respectively. However, if you are unfamiliar with Sexton’s work, and want to get into it, I recommend starting with a single collection instead of The Complete Poems, like I said, this full book is quite the undertaking and given some of the dark themes of Sexton’s work, reading it all back to back can be a psychic hit (though it does make you feel compassion for Sexton who was living with this all in her head most of the time). My personal recommendation is Transformations. This collection was published in 1971 and is a gentle introduction to Sexton. It is a poetic retelling of a lot of fairy tales and folktales. In this collection, you can see many of Sexton’s repeated themes that I talk about here as well as her discussions of life and death, but it leaves out a lot of the more autobiographical aspects of Sexton’s other work, which makes it a little easier to maintain emotional distance while reading. Also, if you are still unsure about poetry or not a fan of poetry, these familiar stories make it more accessible, because you already have an idea of what is going on plot-wise and can better enjoy the language without also having to find the plot.
I definitely am not quite inspired enough to read 600 pages of poetry, although your summary is intriguing. I however do plan on looking into some of these poems. I very much want to read “Hurry Up Please It’s Time” and maybe share it with my anatomy class.