LITERARY CRITICISM · 1993

by Macaulay Woods

The best way to analyze poetry, in my opinion, is to put it through the sensory gauntlet. Pick it up, like a heavy piece of too ripe fruit, feel it's weight, rub it against your body, put it in your mouth, chew it up, suck on it's juices and let it slip down your throat in a pearly white carcass. Eating Sexton's poetry may prove to be a long slow ride to the ER with a case of food poisoning.

Imagine the ride to the hospital, Sexton, dressed in her starched nurse whites, sitting legs open beside you wearing no panties and the only thing between the two of you is a Joan Crawford like expression of mock concern and a hypodermic needle drawn with Draino. Crucifix hanging from her neck, Nurse Sexton caresses you in a gentle fashion as she jams the needle into your ass.

Your life passes in agonizing slow vignettes, all the while she waits licking her lips for your black and white spiraling descent into her Looking glass world of Horrors.

So there you sit, knees up on the gurney, mouth agape in a silent scream, naked except for a johnny tied in the rear, in a world of white sacrificial metaphors. It's too late to turn back. She's got you.

In fact, she's pouring herself a glass of straight gin and looking clear through you with She Witch eyes. That's right, Old Nurse Sexton intends to play with you for a while before she feeds. She runs the crystal tumbler up along her thigh, you, amazed by the absence of color in the room notice for the first time that she has not spoken a word. You are alone with her. There are no doctors, no attendants, and the doors and windows have been painted out. Everything is white.

The air, as if climbing high up Mt Kilimanjaro, cut into your lungs with it's thinness. She approaches, her sarcasm tangible, your apprehension audible, and gashes her hand with the crushed glass she is holding in a shaky grip.

You faint into the white, her bemused look breaking into chortles of laughter that trail off into shrieks in the distance. You awaken to a sense of relief that this mysterious encounter allowed you to escape; however as you look down at your pants you notice a fine blood stain etched into the fiber.

Welcome to the world of Anne Sexton! Shock becomes a ritual morning salute to the sun. Though after a while the shock like effect wears off, as shock always does, leaving an endorphic state of semi consciousness in the reader. Religious references casually interchanged with sexual connotations, in turn exchanged with pop culture, body fluids and orifices, and pristine imagery all combine to a variable poetic Last Supper.

Sexton tears at the flesh of her poems. She waves her exposed wounds in caustic gesticulation, dripping her blue blood on all that enter her willful hemisphere.

A Pulitzer Prize winning poet, for her 1966 collection LIVE OR DIE, Sexton published a series of volumes of poetry including LOVE POEMS (1969) and The Death Notebooks (1974), from which I will pull excerpts for analysis. Interpretations of stylistic tone and voice will be accented, while keeping in mind the sensory pulse of the work that Sexton is praised for by her peers of the literary world. To begin with, a look at The Death Notebooks, specifically the Furies poems.

The Furies are a section at the end of The Death Notebooks. From the Fury of Hating Eyes: [“Take the brown eyes of my father, those gun shots, those mean muds. Bury them. Take the blue eyes of my mother, naked as the sea, waiting to pull you down where there is no air. Bury them. Take the hating eyes of martyrs, presidents, bus collectors, bank managers, soldiers. Bury them. Take my eyes, half blind and falling into the air. Bury them….They like to take my heart and squeeze it like a doughnut. They’d like to take my eyes and poke a hatpin through her pupils. Not just to bury but to stab.” 1

This excerpt from the poem weighs heavy like an anvil resting on a frail chest. Sexton's quickly sizes up the personality traits of her loved ones with a quick punctuated clip, (those gun shots, those mean muds.) The way in which Sexton describes the distant asphyxiation that her mother provokes in her is eerie, Godless, and bankrupt offering no life's breath or nurturance to the poet. Sexton continues to reproach her lover for his calculated cruelty, and does so with disgust. Sparing not even herself, Sexton admonishes her self for being perhaps naive, gullible, or even apathetic. She lobs in a few searing images at us with her vivid contemporary metaphor of her heart as a doughnut, and pokes a hatpin through their pupils.2

The Furies remind us of how cutting a voice Anne Sexton possesses. This collection of poems reveals a rageful Dame Sexton, leaving no word unturned without first twisting it into a writhing demon. In The Fury of Cocks, Sexton cries out to the mundane and ritual nature of sex. [“Where as last night the cock knew it’s way home, as stiff as a hammer, battering in with all of its awful power… Today it is tenders small birds soft as a baby’s hand. She is in the house. He is the steeple. When they fuck they are God. When they snore they are God. In the morning they butter their toast. They don’t say much. They are still God. All of the cocks of the world are God, blooming, blooming, blooming into the sweet blood of women.”] 3

Sexton includes the word God with the imagery of an erect penis driving into her like a steel tool. This voice appears resolved to the nature of the relationship, yet by using the repetitious mantra of “when they fuck they are God” etc, Sexton lashes out at her robotic lover. The mantra repeats her disgust. Stating the line once reveals her wrath, by returning to it twice more, Sexton drives the point home herself, as if in a sexual comparison to the action of the cock.

In it's flaccid state, the cock becomes “harmless as a small bird, or a baby’s hand.”4

These images release the tension of the previous lines. A soft morning after scene, bereft of the previous night's lust transitions into casual apathy. They, who have been so intimate and lusty, now ignore each other over toast.

These few words say so much to not only bring the poem to an end, but also to set a pathetic tone that obviously leaves the woman cold and dissatisfied. Sexton's final verse rehonors the cock, offering it praise and blowing reverie, “blooming, blooming, blooming into the sweet blood of woman”5 returns the union between man and woman to it's sanctity.

Blooming associates the cock with a rose opening to a new dawn; images of fertility and seed are planted in this closing line. The contrast between the apathy of the shared breakfast and the powerful blood engorged image of the cock “blooming into the sweet blood of woman” 6, serve to create and release tension much like that of an orgasm.

The Fury of Sundays, another poem in the Sexton collection from The Death Notebooks, sticks like two sweaty palms on a first date. The imagery from this poem feels down home.

Sexton’s voice, a slow thick drawl, perhaps intoxicated on the vodka that she mentions. The imagery in the poem sets a mood that might be a humid Sunday afternoon in Anytown, U.S.A. It reads like portrait of an American weekend. “Moist, moist, the heat leaking through the hinges, sun baking the roof like pie and I, and thou, and she eating, working, sweating, droned up on the heat. The sun as red as the cop car siren. The sun as red as the algebra marks. The sun as red as two electric eyeballs.” 7

This steamy visual picture transcends real time and space, immediately transporting the reader to the uncomfortably hot memories of his life. Sexton's use of repetition exaggerates the atmosphere of the scene. We feel the heat. We feel the uncomfortability of the moist humidity.

The tone of the poem hints at the sexual heat between “You and me sipping vodka and soda, ice cubes melting like the Virgin Mary” and “She wanting to take a bath in Jello.” Sexton calls the day “leprous” and notes that “Our bodies were trash.” 8

Sexton's use of seedy, slippery, imagery hints at a sexual tryst between the three characters. She also writes “I and thou and she swim like minnows, losing all our queens and kings, losing our heels and our tongues, cool, cool, all day that Sunday in July when we were young and did not look into the abyss, that God spot.” 9

The imagery of losing “our heels and our tongues” conjures up a frolicking sexual encounter on that hot, hot day. The tone reflects almost longingly upon the reckless abandon of youth, where such behavior is almost deemed appropriate for the times. Exploration of the forbidden looms up from this page of poetry.

Sexton, a seductress, pulls the reader into the spongelike heat of that day in July. Because of their youth, they spurned any religious judgement about their behavior. Sexton plays the tease, her breath thick with alcohol and remembers “the pond forgiving our bodies, the pond sucking out the throb.” 10

This water imagery may be construed as religious within a baptismal context. Sexton's choice of the word "forgiving," clearly draws in the Christian tradition, as surely does the phrase "God spot.” 11

Sexton often makes references to God or the Christian tradition in her work. Also making references to the Jew, or the Holocaust experience, Sexton weaves such strong universal connotative imagery together with crude sexual quips. The effect produces an incredulous shock in the reader. Sexton's imagery drips with a tangible jelly, often sickening sweet and sarcastic, Sexton scoops the bottom of the barrel searching for the most offensive word to fit her poem.

Her words hit hard and ring with a savage growl at times. She appears to be the woman scorned. Often bitter about her sexual relations with men, Sexton plays the jilted lover and misunderstood mistress.

In her LOVE POEMS collection published in 1969, Sexton winds a wondrous and sad tale in THE TOUCH: “For months my hand had been sealed off in a tin box. Nothing was here but subway railings. Perhaps it is bruised. I thought, and that is why they have locked it up. But when I looked in, it lay there quietly…It lay there like an unconscious woman fed by tubes she knew not of.” 12

Dissociation with her own physical being strongly erupts from this opening stanza. Loneliness, isolation, self estrangement, and the lack of human love resounds like a lonely cry from a mistreated animal.

Sexton picks up her own hand as if it were a foreign object, detached and cold in a "tin box." The use of the word "they" is indicative of Sexton's feeling of being victimized. "They" locked up her hand for some unknown reason to Sexton. Icy abandon writhes it's way through this poem. The woman is lonely and distant from herself, and apparently at the world's mercy.

Sexton's use of metaphor in this poem is blatant, in fact she refers to it herself. Alienated from Mother, Dad, and even the family dog, Sexton dreams of feeling the life of another in her hand.

Voila, “Your hand found mine. Life rushed into my fingers like a blood clot. Oh, my carpenter. The fingers are rebuilt, they dance with yours.” 13 Sexton basks in the warmth of her new found beau.

Optimism emerges from her words in a youthful way. Sexton places her hopes and dreams in her Dr. Frankenstein, her God, her "carpenter." She speaks of dancing joyfully, “they dance with yours, they dance in the attic and in Vienna.” 14

In, For My lover Returning to His Wife, Sexton assumes the role of the jilted lover who is much more jaded than the girl from The Touch.

In [sic] sarcastic and biting address, Sexton orders her lover back to his wife in almost a royal tone. Sexton lavishes praise upon the wife, recognizing the important and tiresome role that she plays in her lover's life. She tells it like it is, pulling no punches: “Let’s face it. I have been momentary. A luxury. A bright red sloop in the harbor. My hair rising like smoke from the car window. Littleneck clams out of season. She is more than that. She is your have to have, has grown on you, your practical growth experiment. She is all harmony. She sees to oars and oarlocks for the dinghy…done this with her legs spread out in the terrible months in the chapel.” Sexton's comparison of herself with the red sloop makes her yet only another shiny possession to her lover, while his wife is his salt of the earth, his shelter.

Sexton continues to admonish the man for needing his wife, though she appears to understand this need, and acknowledges that she herself is incapable of providing him that kind of stability.

“For the fuse inside of her, throbbing angrily in the dirt, for the bitch in her and the burying of her wound, for the burying of her small red wound alive…She is so naked and singular. She is the sum of yourself and your dream…She is solid…As for me, I am a watercolor. I wash off.” 15

Unable to resist flaying this man alive, Sexton's piece de resistance is her departing blow. This poet puts the word "cat" into cat fight. She plants a stinger like no other in a most vicious way, leaving her prey wrapped in her sticky web of words.

Sexton annihilates her lover while simultaneously forgiving him for his weakness, for needing both her and his wife. Curiously, Sexton spares the wife from any malevolent attack, which leaves her smelling like a champion rose.

By the same token, Sexton spares not herself from her incendiary rhetoric, perhaps because she feels an adulteress’s guilt, or envious of the wife's role. Either way, she fences her self through this work with the skill of a master swordswoman.

In her most bitter Love Poem, Sexton achieves her highest sense of guilt throwing in The Ballad of The Lonely Masturbator. Her opening line {“the end of the affair is always death.”]16 sets the tone for this self depreciating piece. [“finger to finger, now she’s mine. She’s not to far. She’s my encounter. I beat her like hell. I recline in the bower to where you used to mount her.”] 17

[“I break out of my body this way, an annoying miracle. Could I put the dream market on display? I am spread out. I crucify. My little plum is what you said. At night, alone, I marry the bed.”]18 Sexton goes on to retort that her lover has been plucked {“the way a woman takes a bargain off of a dress rack.” Always sarcastic, Sexton again uses her familiar tact of injecting contemporary common place imagery into her work. This "bargain rack" image serves to devalue her former lover in a cutting way.

Sexton's poem US, uses beautiful golden and triumphant imagery as she describes a passionate lovemaking session with her beau. [“I stood up in my gold skin and I beat down the clothes and you undid the bridle and you undid the reins and I undid the buttons, the bones, the confusions, the New England postcards, the January ten o’clock night, and we rose up like wheat, acre after acre of gold, and we harvested, we harvested.”]19

This is perhaps the most scintillating and purely brilliant Sexton poem because it shimmers with ecstasy and passion, rippling across the page in fulfillment. It holds few of her dark imagery trappings, and has wings.

Sexton's Pulitzer Prize winning, Live or Die, contains a number of intense poems using her infamous shocking imagery. Here, Sexton arms herself as a warrior in view of a kill. In Consorting with Angels, Sexton opens with a weary line denouncing her claim to domesticity.

Her strong imagery casts away any claim to being a woman, including [the men who sat at my table, circled around the bowl I offered up. The bowl was filled with purple grapes and even the flies hovered in for the scent and even my father came in with his white bone. But I was tired of the gender things.”] She continues with [“I am black and I am beautiful. I’ve been opened and undressed. I have no arms or legs. I‘m all one skin like a fish. I’m no more woman than Christ was a man.”] 20

Sexton, slippery as an eel and flesh afire with color, waltzes her way out of Jerusalem, held up by Adam and Eve and her own affirmation as a sexless organism, and a spiritual goddess. This poem rings again with a triumph of the wills. However, we see a sad and weary woman, who was probably abused by her father with “his white bone,” 21 forced to transform herself into an eel.

These references to rape ring subtly throughout this piece. By using the metaphor of the flies and her father in the same verse, Sexton reveals the incestuous nature of her familial relationship. Though she escapes her private hell as a confined woman, Sexton's new dynamic form evolved only after much pain. In the final stanza, Sexton materializes as the amphibious eel, and opens herself up to the [“the king in his chamber” 22 ]. Erotic and sublime, this fishlike woman feels limbless and powerless.

Sexton's earlier poems show her command of imagery, voice, and word. The Live or Die poems bear a tight and lucid vision, and often haunt the page with a more sublime quality than the later Death Notebooks. The Death Notebooks poems shock and scratch at the page. Sexton, perhaps restless with alcohol and failed relationships, adopts a hardened and vicious tone. Her later work obstinately challenges her own end. This bitter preoccupation with her own death belies the more ethereal and drifting melancholy of the earlier work, which seems to adhere more strictly in meter and verse.

In a close reading of one of her Live or Die poems, Mother and Jack and the Rain, Sexton introduces her piece with a quiet tone. [“I have a room of my own. Rain drops into it. Rain drops down like worms on to my frontal bone.” 23 ]

The worm imagery turns a somewhat lonely rainy day into a horrific daydream. The mention of the worms dropping on to her pubic area reinforces the horror and goes one better by infiltrating a private part of Sexton. Instantly, her wistful mood turns sour. Sexton discusses the creating [sic] process; she feels "blind" and “haunted."

Several negative responses to the rain turn the natural experience into one of torment. [“Though rain curses the window, let the poems be made. Rain is a finger on my eyeball. Rain drills in with its old unnecessary stories.” 24 ] these painful metaphors again turn her melancholy into agony. Sexton seems unable to sit in her own skin, she blames the rain for her distress, however it is clear that her discomfort runs deeper than the rain.

In the next stanza, Sexton illuminates the real source of her angst. It's the rain that locks her in the house, a place where she would rather not be.

[“I went to bed like a horse to it’s stall. On my damp summer bed I cradled my salty knees and heard father kiss me through the wall and heard mother’s heart pump like the tides…I made no voyages. I owed no passport. I was the daughter. 25 ”]

The poet cries out like a captive from her summer family cottage. Again she makes known the alcoholic nature of her father, and the incestuous relationship between them. Sexton feels torment. All of the worm metaphors italicize her suffering.

This poem sourly sentimentalizes her youth as a sixteen year old at a lakeside retreat. She goes on to describe an innocent relationship with a young man. The pre- intercourse exploration phase with the fellow Jack:

[“Where I lay all night beside Jack and did nothing at all, lay straight as a bean.I lay, a blind lake, feigning sleep while Jack pulled back the covers to see my body, that invisible body that girls keep.”26 ]. This stanza serves to acknowledge Sexton as an inexperienced youth, by doing so, it creates a tension between the agony of the earlier stanza.

In the final stanza, Sexton lets on that she now is in the present moment, a mature woman reminiscing about her youth. The rain serves as a reminder of both pleasant and dank memories. Sexton informs the reader that [Now Jack says the Mass and mother died using her own bones for crutches. There is rain on the wood, rain on the glass and I’m in a room of my own. I think too much.” 27 ].

The voice again turns bitterly nostalgic, as if she somehow yearns for those old disappointing days to emerge. Sexton commands the rain to fall upon the reader like her sorrow.

The rain hitting the wood and glass are audible, and her loneliness is tangible. Sexton feels exiled from heaven, she refers to a series of religious imagery with, [“Fish swim from the eyes of God. Let them pass. Mother and Jack fill up heaven; they endorse my womanhood. I come to this land to ride my horse, to try my own guitar, to cop-out their two separate names like sunflowers, to conjure up my daily bread, to endure, somehow to endure.” 28 ].

The profound grief and stillness of this imagery embalms the poem in a Saran Wrap shawl. It lays breathless and suffocating. There is a chill in the air. Sexton's voice, now quiet and remote, vows to endure the trials of life. The sunflower and horse imagery lift the poem up from Sexton’s familiar death march; she uses the guitar as her hopeful voice.

Anne Sexton slays the written page with her powerful imagery. There is no timidity in her voice, it shakes with sarcasm, bitterness, disapproval and sometimes disgust. Her visuals haunt, seduce and scheme to lure the reader into the house where she lives. If you listen long enough, you can hear the ice clinking against her familiar security, her glass of gin.

Gin and words, dark words, biting words, furious words, these words wrap around Sexton like a poison coat. She rarely lifts her head up and sings, but when she musters the energy to cast down her sword she soars.

She seems to sit alone in a boat on dark waters, she cast away her paddles and turns her back to the land. Her loss of faith in her environment weighs heavy upon her soul.

Sexton's presence and dynamism are undeniable. She commandeers the unwilling and seduces the agony out of all of us. Champion of derision and wittier than hell, Sexton seems to have “built her death as a carpenter,” just as she planned.

/MW ‘93

NOTES

1 Anne Sexton, The Fury of Hating Eyes, p.29, The Death Notebooks, 1974

2 Anne Sexton, The Fury of Cocks, p.37, The Death Notebooks, 1974

3 Anne Sexton, The Fury of Cocks, p.37, The Death Notebooks, 1974

4 Sexton, The Fury of Cocks, p.37, The Death Notebooks, 1974

5 Anne Sexton, The Fury of Cocks, p.37, The Death Notebooks, 1974

6 Anne Sexton, The Fury of Cocks, p. 37, The Death Notebooks, 1974

7 Anne Sexton, The Fury of Sundays, The Death Notebooks, 1974

8 Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems, p.375, 1981 by Houghton Mifflin

9 Anne Sexton, The Fury of Sundays, p.48, The Death Notebooks, 1974

10 Anne Sexton, The Fury of Sundays, p.48, The Death Notebooks, 1974

11 Anne Sexton, The Fury of Sundays, p.48, The Death Notebooks, 1974

12 Anne Sexton, The Touch, The Complete Poems, p. 173, 1981

13 Anne Sexton, The Touch, The Complete Poems, p. 174, 1981

14 Anne Sexton, The Touch, The Complete Poems, p. 174, 1981

15 Anne Sexton, For My Lover, Returning To His Wife, p.21, The Death Notebooks, 1974

16 Anne Sexton, The Touch, The Complete Poems, p.198, 1981

17 Anne Sexton, The Touch, The Complete Poems, p. 198, 1981

18 Anne Sexton, The Touch, The Complete Poems, p. 198, 1981

19 Anne Sexton, US, The Complete Poems, p. 198, 1981

20 Anne Sexton, Consorting with angels, The Complete Poems, p. 111, 1981

21 Author’s note: This claim is the author’s reading from 1993. It is not established fact.

22 Anne Sexton, Consorting with angels, The Complete Poems, p. 112, 1981

23 Anne Sexton, Mother and Jack and the Rain, The Complete Poems, p. 109, 1981

24 Anne Sexton, Mother and Jack and the Rain, The Complete Poems, p. 109, 1981

25 Anne Sexton, Mother and Jack and the Rain, The Complete Poems, p. 110, 1981

26 Anne Sexton, Mother and Jack and the Rain, The Complete Poems, p. 110, 1981

27 Anne Sexton, Mother and Jack and the Rain, The Complete Poems, p. 110, 1981

28 Anne Sexton, Mother and Jack and the Rain, The Complete Poems, p. 110, 1981

© 1993 Macaulay Woods. All rights reserved.