Anne Sexton Essay

432 Words2 Pages
Anne Sexton is the poet I chose to write about. She was born in Newton, Massachusetts in 1928, she committed suicide after several mental breakdowns at the age of forty-six. She held many different jobs, she was a librarian, fashion model, and taught English at Colleges and Universities. Anne Sexton was a very good poet and she has very interesting work. The title of the poem “Said the Poem to the Analyst” is kind of a boring title to start with, but after you read through the poem you can see that it actually adds a lot. Without the title you would never even be able to tell who the poet was talking to, or even if the poet was talking to anyone at all. Also, throughout the poem the two jobs, poet and analyst, are compared but in very subtle, open-to-wide interpretation ways. The title sets a frame for the poem that really gives the reader a mindset to start reading. The poem is written in an odd, half-rhyming, half-free verse type of arrangement where the first two line of each stanza are not rhymed but then it has a “AB AB CD C” rhyme scheme. Another thing is that each line doesn’t have the same number of syllables. The numbers are close, except for the last line of each stanza containing only three words each. Since I think that the poem is broken up into two clear parts by the stanzas, the short line at the end of each is like a small conclusion. The first stanza is expressing how to be a poet. A poet "works with words" and in this stanza it seems like Sexton compares words to a kind of animal that needs to be tamed and set in order. She is saying that words are as important as labels (which refers to names) or coins (money), and the swarming bees refers to life itself. In the poem it states, “as if words were counted like dead bees in the attic/ unbuckled from their yellow eyes and their dry wings.” This is kind of confusing but Sexton is not actually

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