Anne Sexton was born in Newton, Massachusetts, in 1928, and grew up in Wellesley where Sylvia
Plath spent her childhood, too. Anne Sexton lived most of her life in Weston.
Frustrated as a housewife and mother in suburban Boston and plagued by mental problems including suicidal obsessions, Sexton,
beautiful, intense, and gifted, began writing poetry at age 29 on the advice of her therapist.
Plath and Sexton attended a poetry class with Robert Lowell in the summer of 1959.
Anne Sexton died at her own hand in 1974.
More information on the relationship between Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath can be found at
the homepage of
Modernist Conversations.
On this page here you can find two poems by Anne Sexton that were inspired by Sylvia Plath,
or rather by her suicide:
O Sylvia, Sylvia,
with a dead box of stones and
spoons,
with two children, two meteors
wandering loose in a
tiny playroom,
with your mouth into the sheet,
into the
roofbeam, into the dumb prayer,
(Sylvia, Sylvia
where did you
go
after you wrote me
from Devonshire
about rasing
potatoes
and keeping bees?)
what did you stand by,
just
how did you lie down into?
Thief --
how did you crawl
into,
crawl down alone
into the death I wanted so badly and for
so long,
the death we said we both outgrew,
the one we wore on
our skinny breasts,
the one we talked of so often each time
we
downed three extra dry martinis in Boston,
the death that talked of
analysts and cures,
the death that talked like brides with
plots,
the death we drank to,
the motives and the quiet
deed?
(In Boston
the dying
ride in cabs,
yes death
again,
that ride home
with our boy.)
O Sylvia, I
remember the sleepy drummer
who beat on our eyes with an old
story,
how we wanted to let him come
like a sadist or a New
York fairy
to do his job,
a necessity, a window in a wall or a
crib,
and since that time he waited
under our heart, our
cupboard,
and I see now that we store him up
year after year,
old suicides
and I know at the news of your death
a terrible
taste for it, like salt,
(And me,
me too.
And now,
Sylvia,
you again
with death again,
that ride
home
with our boy.)
And I say only
with my arms
stretched out into that stone place,
what is your death
but an
old belonging,
a mole that fell out
of one of your
poems?
(O friend,
while the moon's bad,
and the king's
gone,
and the queen's at her wit's end
the bar fly ought to
sing!)
O tiny mother,
you too!
O funny duchess!
O
blonde thing!
February 17, 1963
Since you ask, most
days I cannot remember.
I walk in my clothing, unmarked by that
voyage.
Then the most 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 and year,
to so delicately undo an old
would,
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 a book carelessly open,
something unsaid, the phone off the
hook
and the look, whatever it was, an infection.
February 3, 1964
You can order the following books/tapes online at Amazon.com:
a cassette
with Anne Sexton reading her poetry
(poems included are Her Kind/Divorce, Thy Name Is Woman/Little Girl, My String Bean, My Lovely Woman and others)
The Complete Poems
Published by Houghton Mifflin, Paperback, 622 pages
Anne Sexton : A Biography by Diane Wood Middlebrook
Published by Random House 1992, Paperback, 498 pages