In 1960, at the beginning of her rise to prominence, Sexton wrote “Her Kind,” a controlled three-stanza confessional that concluded To Bedlam and Part Way Back. The poem illustrates the author’s immersion in a New England tradition, the roundup of hapless females to be tormented and executed during the Salem witch persecutions. In one of the poet’s characteristic split personalities, through a double first-person presentation, she merges consciousness with a subversive, energized woman shunned by the pious as she is hunted for witchcraft. The loosely structured four-beat lines follow a rhyme scheme of ababcdc, linked by mostly monosyllabic end words. Each stanza concludes with the markedly forthright three-beat iambic refrain, “I have been her kind,” which names her jazz ensemble, Anne Sexton and Her Kind. Images of darkness and freakishness dominate the first stanza, which stresses a compulsion to roam outside the confines of civility. The dual-natured character is both witch and violator of the domestic womanhood that inhabits the “plain houses” below.
Lonely and driven, the speaker ranges beyond civilization to surprisingly inviting caverns, where she fills the warm emptiness with a rat pack of possessions. Arranged on orderly shelves are oddments derived from past episodes of eccentricity and madness. Like good children, her companions, worms and elves, eat her suppers. Innately “disaligned,” they submit to reshaping, a personal reference to Sexton’s organic poetry and failed attempts of psychological analysis and treatment with Thorazine. At the end of the stanza, she defends the speaker as “misunderstood,” a defense of her own erratic behaviors.
The poem returns to well-lighted places as an unidentified carter drives the speaker toward execution. Wracked by flames and the wheel, an allusion to a medieval torture device on which victims were simultaneously rotated, pierced, and stretched, the speaker appears to greet villagers, who reside in the bright houses she once soared above in her flight from conventionality. Although her arms are nude and vulnerable, in her last moments, she is boldly unashamed of previous deeds and attitudes. Eagerly, proudly, the witch-poet embraces the identity of other brave, possessed women. Like them, she yields to torment for violating polite womanhood.
An equally fantastic view of womanhood appears in “Housewife.” A ten-line free verse poem composed in 1962, its tight imagery depicts a house as a physical entity with heart, mouth, liver, and intestines. The woman, a self-sacrificing drone imprisoned in flesh-toned walls, kneels as she performs daily drudgery, scrubbing the house that has devoured her. The poet characterizes male authority figures as rapists, the intrusive cripplers who shatter woman’s wholeness. Like Jonah, the Old Testament sailor swallowed and disgorged by a whale, the male householder penetrates a woman-centered home like an incestuous son returning to his mother’s womb. The speaker stresses the oneness of all women, in particular, mother and daughter. The poet’s matrophilia is a positive impulse that allows Sexton to love her mother and herself, the producer of two daughters.
Written in the same time period, “The Truth the Dead Know” commemorates Sexton’s grief for her parents, who died in 1959 within three months of each other—her mother from breast cancer, her father from cerebral hemorrhage. The speaker recalls her father’s funeral in June, when she left the formal funeral to walk alone from the church as though turning her back on God and ritual. Later, at the shore, the poet recalls sunlight that glitters like a candle and the surf, which swings to land like an iron gate. The wind, as impersonal as falling stones, drives inland from “whitehearted water,” a suggestion of bloodlessness and diminished passion. Simultaneously with nature’s functions, the speaker touches a loved one and affirms life.
The final quatrain bears out an alternating rhyme scheme, which links perfect and imperfect rhymes of church/hearse, grave/brave, cultivate/gate, sky/die, stones/alone, and touch/much. In the concluding lines, Sexton allies shoes/refuse with stone/knucklebone, a hard-edged conclusion that jars like a fist to the eye. The impertinence of her tone in “And what of the dead?” loses its initial sassiness as she subsides to death images. She envisions the dead lying shoeless in tombs as rigid as “stone boats.” However, the brief flicker of sobriety is a boxer’s sucker punch, a feint that precedes a right hook in her defiance of mortality.
Perhaps her most read work on mortality, “Sylvia’s Death,” scrolls out like a long, emotion-charged farewell. It was written on February 17, 1963, six days after the suicide of poet Sylvia Plath, and published in 1966. Sexton had assisted the Unitarian minister in selecting lines to read at a memorial service. In retrospect of Plath’s need for closure, Sexton determined that her friend had chosen an appropriate homecoming. The comment weighs heavy in light of her own choice of self-destruction.
Speaking intimately of the addictive yearning for death, Sexton calls to her friend, asking how she could crawl into an oven to die, abandoning Sexton for a liberating death that they had both foresworn as though giving up cigarettes or chocolate. Personal memories of a cab ride in Boston obscure events that the two shared as they debated the issue of suicide. Personifications of death, “our boy,” the “sleepy drummer,” hammer at the poet’s consciousness with a lust for death. The news that Sylvia has at last committed the long-contemplated act leaves a taste of salt, no doubt generated by tears. Critics debate whether the source of Sexton’s weeping is grief or self-pity or a blend of the two.
The poet reaches out to the “stone place” in which Sylvia is buried and acknowledges that they once shared death like membership in a club. Sexton identifies the yearning for release from undisclosed pain as a mole that permeates Plath’s verse, a perky underground being whose blind vitality contrasts the stillness of the buried corpse. The poem closes with three addresses to Sylvia—startling images that glimpse her as mother, duchess, and “blonde thing.”
