Anne Sexton
Anne Sexton once told a journalist that her fans thought she got better, but actually, she just became a poet. These words are characteristic of a talented poet that received therapy for years, but committed suicide in spite of this. The poetry fed her art, but it also imprisoned her in a way.
Her parents didn’t expect much of her academically, and after completing her schooling at Rogers Hall, she went to a finishing school in Boston. Anne met her husband, Kayo (Alfred Muller Sexton II), in 1948 by correspondence. Her mother advised her to elope after she thought she might be pregnant. Anne and Kayo got married in 1948 in North Carolina. After the honeymoon Kayo started working at his father-in-law’s wool business.
In 1953 Anne gave birth to her first-born, Linda Gray. Two years later Linda’s sister, Joyce Ladd, was born. But Anne couldn’t cope with the pressure of two small children over and above Kayo’s frequent absence (due to work). Shortly after Joy was born, Anne was admitted to Westwood Lodge where she was treated by the psychiatrist Dr. Martha Brunner-Orne (and six months later, her son, Dr. Martin Orne, took over). The original diagnosis was for post-natal depression, but the psychologists later decided that Anne suffered from depression of biological nature.
While she was receiving psychiatric treatment, Anne started writing poetry. It all started after another suicide attempt, when Orne came to her and told her that she still has a purpose in life. At that stage she was convinced that she could only become a prostitute. Orne showed her another talent that she had, and her first poetry appeared in print in the January of 1957. She wrote a huge amount of poetry that was published in a dozen poetry books. In 1967 she became the proud recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Live or Die (1966).
In March 1972 Anne and Kayo got divorced. After this a desperate kind of loneliness took over her life. Her addiction to pills and alcohol worsened. Without Kayo the house was very quiet, the children were at college and most of Anne’s friends were avoiding her because they could no longer sympathize with her growing problems. Her poetry started playing such a major role in her life that conflicts were written out, rather than being faced. Anne didn’t mention a word to Kayo about her intention to get divorced. He knew that she desperately needed him, but her poems, and her real feelings toward him, put it differently. Kayo talks about it in an interview as follows: “... I honestly don’t know, never have known, what her real, driving motive was in the divorce. Which is another reason why it absolutely drove me into the floor like a nail when she did it.”
On 4 October 1974 she put on her mother’s old fur coat before, glass of vodka in hand, she climbed into her car, turned the key and died of monodioxide inhalation. She once told Orne that “I feel like my mother whenever I put it [the fur coat] on”. Her oldest daughter, Linda, was appointed as literary executor and we have her to thank for the three poetry books that appeared posthumously.
“There once was a millerwith a daughter as lovely as a grape.He told the king that she couldspin gold out of common straw.The king summoned the girland locked her in a room full of strawand told her to spin it into goldor she would die like a criminal.Poor grape with no one to pick.Luscious and round and sleek.Poor thing.To die and never see Brooklyn.(Rumpelstiltskin)”
“Fee-fi-fo-fum -Now I'm borrowed.Now I'm numb.”
“Even without wars, life is dangerous.”
“The grass as bristly and stout as chives and me wondering when the ground will break and me wondering how anything fragile survives”
“I am stuffing your mouth with yourpromises and watching you vomit them out upon my face.”
“All day I've builta lifetime and nowthe sun sinks toundo it. ”
“Take your foot out of the graveyard, they are busy being dead.”
“I must always forget how one word is able to pick out another, to manner another, until I have got something I might have said... but did not.”
“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.”
“Poetry is my life, my postmark, my hands, my kitchen, my face.”
“Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem.”
“Love? Be it man. Be it woman.It must be a wave you want to glide in on,give your body to it, give your laugh to it,give, when the gravelly sand takes you,your tears to the land. To love another is somethinglike prayer and can't be planned, you just fallinto its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.”
“Sometimes I fly like an eagle but with the wings of a wren”
“being sixteen in the pants I died full of questions”
“Yesterday I did not want to be borrowed but this is the typewriter that sits before me and love is where yesterday is at.”
“Live or die, but don't poison everything.”
“Suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools.They never ask why build.”
“Her KindI have gone out, a possessed witch,haunting the black air, braver at night;dreaming evil, I have done my hitchover the plain houses, light by light:lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.A woman like that is not a woman, quite.I have been her kind.I have found the warm caves in the woods,filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,closets, silks, innumerable goods;fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:whining, rearranging the disaligned.A woman like that is misunderstood.I have been her kind.I have ridden in your cart, driver,waved my nude arms at villages going by,learning the last bright routes, survivorwhere your flames still bite my thighand my ribs crack where your wheels wind.A woman like that is not ashamed to die.I have been her kind.”
“All I wanted was a little piece of life, to be married, to have children. [...] I was trying my damnedest to lead a conventional life, for that was how I was brought up, and it was what my husband wanted of me. But one can't build little white picket fences to keep the nightmares out.”
“You, Doctor Martin, walkfrom breakfast to madness. Late August,I speed through the antiseptic tunnelwhere the moving dead still talkof pushing their bones against the thrustof cure. And I am queen of this summer hotelor the laughing bee on a stalkof death. We stand in brokenlines and wait while they unlockthe doors and count us at the frozen gatesof dinner. The shibboleth is spokenand we move to gravy in our smockof smiles. We chew in rows, our platesscratch and whine like chalkin school. There are no knivesfor cutting your throat. I makemoccasins all morning. At first my handskept empty, unraveled for the livesthey used to work. Now I learn to takethem back, each angry finger that demandsI mend what another will breaktomorrow. Of course, I love you;you lean above the plastic sky,god of our block, prince of all the foxes.The breaking crowns are newthat Jack wore. Your third eyemoves among us and lights the separate boxeswhere we sleep or cry.What large children we arehere. All over I grow most tallin the best ward. Your business is people,you call at the madhouse, an oraculareye in our nest. Out in the hallthe intercom pages you. You twist in the pullof the foxy children who falllike floods of life in frost.And we are magic talking to itself,noisy and alone. I am queen of all my sinsforgotten. Am I still lost?Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself,counting this row and that row of moccasinswaiting on the silent shelf.”
“Now I am just an elderly lady who is full of spleen, who humps around greater Boston in a God-awful hat, who never lived and yet outlived her time, hating men and dogs and Democrats.”
“Only my books anoint me, and a few friends, those who reach into my veins.”
“I am alone here in my own mind. There is no map and there is no road. It is one of a kind just as yours is.”
“She is so naked and singular. She is the sum of yourself and your dream. Climb her like a monument, step after step. She is solid.”
“Yet love enters my blood like an I.V., dripping in its little white moments.”
“The soul was not cured, it was as full as a clothes closet of dresses that did not fit.”
“the man inside of woman ties a knot so that they will never again be separate…”
“Even so, I must admire your skill. You are so gracefully insane.”
“Depression is boring, I thinkand I would do better to makesome soup and light up the cave.”
“It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.”
“God owns heaven but He craves the earth.”
“Don't bite till you know if it's bread or stone.”
“O starry night, This is how I want to die”
“But I can't. Need is not quite belief.”
“I burn the way money burns.”
“The beautiful feeling after writing a poem is on the whole better even than after sex, and that's saying a lot.”
“The joy that isn't shared dies young.”
“Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.”
“Now I am going back And I have ripped my hand From your hand as I said I would And I have made it this far ...”
“Rats live on no evil star”
“Everyone in me is a birdI am beating all my wings”
“Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself,Counting this row and that row of moccasinsWaiting on the silent shelf.”
“Anne, I don't want to live. . . . Now listen, life is lovely, but I Can't Live It. I can't even explain. I know how silly it sounds . . . but if you knew how it Felt. To be alive, yes, alive, but not be able to live it. Ay that's the rub. I am like a stone that lives . . . locked outside of all that's real. . . . Anne, do you know of such things, can you hear???? I wish, or think I wish, that I were dying of something for then I could be brave, but to be not dying, and yet . . . and yet to [be] behind a wall, watching everyone fit in where I can't, to talk behind a gray foggy wall, to live but to not reach or to reach wrong . . . to do it all wrong . . . believe me, (can you?) . . . what's wrong. I want to belong. I'm like a jew who ends up in the wrong country. I'm not a part. I'm not a member. I'm frozen.”
“As for me, I am a watercolor. I wash off.”
“And what of the dead? They lie without shoesin the stone boats. They are more like stonethan the sea would be if it stopped. They refuseto be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone. ”
“Watch out for intellect,because it knows so much it knows nothingand leaves you hanging upside down,mouthing knowledge as your heartfalls out of your mouth.”
“As it has been said:Love and a coughcannot be concealed.Even a small cough.Even a small love.”
“I am God, la de dah.”
“Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.”
“Being kissed on the back of the knee is a moth at the windowscreen....”