Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

The Poetry of Anne Sexton 207
defensively separates her from him, and blocks any progress that they
might together make toward an understanding; yet the stars still shine
underneath, a luminous invitation toward truth.
This is something I would never
find in a lovelier place, my dear,
although your fear is anyone’s fear,
like an invisible veil between us all . . .
and sometimes in private
my kitchen, your kitchen,
my face, your face.
Whatever truth the speaker seeks, it will not be available in “lovelier
places” than the private mind speaking its halting language to
another private mind, trying to make contact. What separates them,
she knows, is the hearer’s fear, “anyone’s fear,” not only of the sick
or mad or sordid; “your fear” is also the subject of the inquiry itself.
Although the grammatical construction of the last lines is ambiguous,
I read them to mean secondarily that the fear pulls down the veil
between them in their kitchens and on their faces, and primarily that
this “something,” this “special sort of hope,” takes place in the kitchen
and is revealed, through the mutually cracked glass bowls, on their
distorted, human, striving faces.
The two lengthy poems that follow this preface to Part II of
Bedlam reveal the “source and subject” of the cracked stars that John/
Jocasta does not want to hear. “The Double Image” and “The Division
of Parts” show us this other “cracked mirror” of the mother, image of
fragmentation and wholeness for the speaker.
. . . my mocking mirror, my overthrown
love, my first image. She eyes me from that face,
that stony head of death
I had outgrown.
Addressed to her daughter, “The Double Image” tells the story of a
thirty-year-old mother who goes to live with her own mother after the
speaker’s suicide attempt. An “outgrown child,” she inhabits her mother’s
house as an unwelcome guest who must submit to her mother’s resentment
for her suicide attempt, and who must sit for a portrait of herself