Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

210
The Poetry of Anne Sexton
The speaker of this poem is the same woman who remembers putting
“bees in my mouth” to keep from devouring her mother in the nursing
process as an infant; who knows that “all my need took you down like a
meal”; who, though she does not know it as a child, will utterly defeat
her mother in “Those Times . . .”
I did not know that my life, in the end,
would run over my mother’s like a truck
and all that would remain
from the year I was six
was a small hole in my heart, a deaf spot,
so that I might hear
the unsaid more clearly.
The “hole in the heart,” that “deaf spot,” becomes the poet’s source
of the knowledge of absence; blocked by childhood indignities from
hearing the ordinary music of daily life, she takes on the special
sensual acuity of the handicapped: what she will hear is the unsaid, just
as blind Oedipus will “see” with the sight of the blind visionary.
And like Oedipus, Sexton did not want to run over her mother’s
life like a truck, or to give her cancer, or to defeat her, or to slay her; she
intended, rather, like Oedipus, the opposite; to protect that beloved if
rejecting parent. Oedipus is utterly rejected by his biological parents,
who wish to murder him that he might not murder his father; his
other parents, unknowingly adoptive, are those he loves and flees
Corinth to protect when he hears the Oracle. In so fleeing, he fulfills
the prophecy. In the Oedipus myth, then, the parental figures are split;
the actual and rejecting parents, and the adoptive and loving ones,
who might after all be called the “real” parents. In the normative infant
and childhood psyche, these roles of rejecting and loving parents are
united, so that reality and imago emerge from the same identities and
bodies; it is the real parents we love and wish to protect, their imagos
we wish to murder and marry. Seeking this complex truth, Sexton
knows that she must make reparation for the split inside her that
duplicates the split in the psyches of her parents, who both rejected
and loved her, just as she rejects and loves them.
Having “murdered” her mother in the psychic sense, she processed
such guilt as if fated to do so. It matters little, I would say, whether
or not Mary Gray actually told Anne Sexton that Sexton “gave her