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The Poetry of Anne Sexton 213
father, a permanent oscillation between two conflicting desires: to
divorce and be done with; and to “marry, at last.”
* * * * *
Far from being done with the horrors he discovers in his pursuit of
truth when he does indeed uncover it and blind himself, Oedipus
does not find peace until he awaits death at Colonus, in the wake of
years of blind wandering. The Jocastas in Anne Sexton’s life begged
her not to inquire further; when she did, psychoanalysis held out to
her the hope of which Bettelheim speaks on behalf of psychoanalysis:
that knowledge of the truth will set one free. Her truth, tougher by
far than either the willed ignorance of Jocasta which cannot endure
revelation, or the mandated “liberty” of analytic cure, is more like that
of the original Oedipus: complex, tragic, visionary. Sexton did not,
like Jocasta, find the sought truth and simply die of it; in the many
years between her first exploration of truth in Bedlam and her death
in 1974, she triumphed over her guilt and her ghosts again and again.
The “strange goddess face” of the slain mother whom the infant ate—
“all my need took / you down like a meal”—is redeemed in a dream of
reparation and mutual forgiveness in “Dreaming the Breasts:”
The breasts I knew at midnight
beat like the sea in me now.
Mother, I put bees in my mouth
to keep from eating
yet it did you no good.
In the end they cut off your breasts
and milk poured from them
into the surgeon’s hand
and he embraced them.
I took them from him
and planted them.
The planting of the mother’s severed breasts enables “those dear
white ponies” to “go galloping, galloping, / wherever you are;” and the
daughter, for the moment of this poem, is renewed into her own life,
free of guilt and pain. In “All My Pretty Ones,” the daughter discovering
her father’s flaws after his death in her mother’s diary is able, by