Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

The Poetry of Anne Sexton 205
oneself, however awful, can yield a pattern, a structure, that will
teach one “something worth learning” about how one’s mystery can
be unwoven. The “narrow diary of my mind” elicits images of the
private person confiding confidences to a small and secret book, and
she is aware that in employing this image, she addresses the implicit
reservations anyone might have about the divulgence of confidences.
Yet it seems to me that straight as this image is, Sexton must have
intended some slight irony, angry as she had been during the process
that led up to this finally loving, forgiving, giving poem addressed
to a father figure, teacher, and friend who was, as she later said, “in
the long run, ashamed of me where you might be proud of me.” 12
The “commonplaces of the asylum” include the “cracked mirror,” in
which the beholder must acknowledge the fragmented pieces of the
self, held up to the scrutiny of whatever wholeness that perceiver can
manage. It also prefigures the next and central image of the poem,
which Diane Middlebrook finds central not only to this poem, but to
Sexton’s entire poetics:
I tapped my own head;
it was glass, an inverted bowl,
It is a small thing
to rage in your own bowl.
At first it was private,
Then it was more than myself;
it was you, or your house
or your kitchen.
Like that other star-crossed poet, Plath, Sexton is trapped in her bell
jar, “an inverted bowl.” But by the act of tapping it, she tentatively
releases powers that reveal to her that her pain is more than private,
that she shares with other isolated beings this “small thing” enlarged
by sympathy and empathy.
The scene of this coming into connection with others trapped in
their inverted bowls is, significantly, the “house,” and more particularly
the kitchen, locale of so many of Sexton’s scenes of recognition,
as it was of Plath’s. It is not only, I think, that the kitchen is such a
female place, but that here the ritual of preparing and eating food
takes place: here all modern people are most literally nourished. This
is the room in which her world, suburban America, finds itself most at