SOURCE: "Anne Sexton's Love Poems: The Genre and the Differences," in Modern Poetry Studies, Vol. 10, 1980, pp. 58-68.

[In the following essay, Shurr discusses the composition and central motifs of Love Poems. According to Shurr, in Love Poems Sexton "merges the possibility of the ancient genre of erotic love poetry with the immediacy of modern experience."]

At least half of Anne Sexton's published volumes of poetry show a tight unity of construction. Though virtually all of the poems were published separately in various periodicals, and thus each can stand by itself as a complete poem, in the collections they are brought into programmatic relation to one another. This is most obvious in Transformations, where the subjects are all known fairy tales and the speaker and the format of presentation is in every case the same. But study of Love Poems, The Death Notebooks, and The Awful Rowing Toward God—and, to a lesser extent, Live or Die—can uncover a similar continuity of experience. In the remaining volumes the reader finds suites of poems in which each can be taken separately but which yield a still "higher" synthesis when taken together.

Love Poems (1969) is more than simply a collection of love poems; it is the record of a love affair which, as it is presented in the volume, lasted about four years. As shaped in the volume the experience was characterized by intense moments which the lovers had together as well as frequent separations, and it finally ended definitively. One senses in Love Poems a conscious attempt to isolate the experience from all others, to shape it into a unity and present the stages of its evolution as typical. A clue to Sexton's intention in shaping the collection is the forcefully suggestive passage from Yeats with which she introduced it:

     One should say before sleeping, "I have
     lived many lives. I have been a slave and a
     prince. Many a beloved has sat upon my knees
     and I have sat upon the knees of many a beloved.
     Everything that has been shall be again."

What we are to make of this is perhaps that Sexton is searching for essential contours, for a pattern of events that is repeatable and has been repeated a billion times in human history. Any collection of love poetry, or any suite of love poems, celebrates essentially the same sequence: the fascination, the awakening, the consummation, the celebration, the love-sickness in absence, the parting and the end of the affair: "everything that has been shall be again." But so intensely lived is the experience that it seems to the lovers that it must be their unique experience alone; John Donne would persuade us that no other lovers had ever existed, that he exists as priest to unfold the wonders of this experience to the laity, gradually, according to their ability to understand. As Sexton introduces her poems, through the quotation from Yeats, she would interpret the genre to us as one in which we may appreciate again the universal moments in the experience and look as well for her own personal heightenings and insights.

By far the most highly dramatized moment of the collection, and the most intensely erotic, is the poem which celebrates "That Day." The poem has some elements of the medieval alba: reliving the experience and celebrating its stages in lavish detail, praising the lover's beauty (here, the details of the erection which she herself has manipulated), the union, and watching over the lover's sleep afterward. In the Troubadours, the sexual reward is the Lady's "gift," and Sexton rewrites and modernizes the tradition. "I bore gifts for your gift." Also in medieval love poetry, one finds the convention of the lovers' prayer to avoid the excesses of the unfortunate lovers of old. Medea is mentioned, and more frequently Dido, the Queen of Carthage who wanted to marry Aeneas even though she knew the Fates had decreed another wife for him, who begged at least to have a child by him as a permanent reminder of their love, and who finally committed suicide. Sexton's prayer, against this background, is chilling:

     Then I knew you in your dream and prayed of our time
     that I would be pierced and you would take root in me
     and that I might bring forth your born, might bear
     the you or the ghost of you in my little household.

The lovely eroticism of "That Day" is further heightened, interpreted, by its own framework. The typical dawn setting of the alba has been displaced. The experience of "That Day" is recounted the next day; the beloved is absent. In his place, quite literally where he had been, the mechanical typewriter is now in her hands. The end is foreseen and her aloneness frames the poem. The last lines read: "but this is the typewriter that sits before me and love is where yesterday is at."

"That Day" is the fifth poem of the collection and is preceded by three poems of preparation: the awakening of "The Hand," which will touch the beloved for the first time; the awakening of "The Kiss," which suddenly becomes adult, erotic; the awakening of "The Breast," which finds its best function in giving and receiving pleasure, in mothering the lover. What is perceived and repeated in each of these poems is the transition to a higher plane of being, the unfolding of a different function and a different kind of experience. The consummation of these preparations in "That Day" is then orchestrated with a powerful unleashing of new emotional forces. Some of Sexton's most striking lines appear in these three poems. In a vivid image she describes the hand, before its awakening, as "sealed off / in a tin box." An image of transformation at the end of "The Kiss" arrests the attention: "Darling, the composer has stepped / into fire." In each case the suspension caused by the enjambement adds to the effect. Where the musical suggestion is here Wagnerian, it becomes playful in the next poem, "The Breast," where she describes her previously childish body as "A xylophone maybe with skin stretched over it awkwardly."

The natural flow, however, seems arrested by the difficult fourth poem in this initial group of five. It is called "The Interrogation Of The Man Of Many Hearts." It interrupts the continuity of the three preparatory poems with the following fulfillment poem. While the attention it requires seems to break the erotic line of development, it nevertheless clearly defines the situation of the affair and states themes which develop later as the painful dimension of the experience. It is as if Sexton were deliberately interrupting the pleasant expectations of the reader, to insist on the full reality of the matter.

"The Interrogation Of The Man Of Many Hearts" probes the psychology of the male, who obviously enjoys the sexual experience with the interrogating woman, but who will inevitably rest in a more permanent married relationship with another woman. His instinct to marry another is not entirely reasonable. He acknowledges that

      She's my real witch, my fork, my mare,
      my mother of tears, my skirtful of hell,
      the stamp of my sorrows, the stamp of my bruises …

But still, he says, "I'm caught deep in the dye of her." The poem is a sequence of questions from the woman, with answers from the man. Once again the tradition of medieval love poetry comes to mind. Andreas Capellanus states that, among the rules for Courtly Love marriage is actually an impediment to romantic love; the experience is heightened to its fullest only by the excitement of being extramarital, adulterous. Still another poetic technique of the Troubadours, the conversation between the lovers, the alternating debat between the man and the woman, is embodied in these lines.

The woman is sympathetically aware of the compulsive drives of the male. He admits that his polygamous instincts conflict with her essentially monogamous needs; what is a temporary need for him is permanent need for her:

    I have not only bedded her down.
    I have tied her down with a knot.

Sexton leads the reader through the nuances of reality, deeply felt and rendered with clear verbal intelligence. The wisdom she retrieves from this painful interrogation is the fact of the mutability of all experience, an ancient piece of wisdom traceable through Spenser and Boethius back to Ecclesiastes. Whether sanctioned by society and traditions or not, the final lesson of human experience is the same:

     and every bed has been condemned
     not by morality or law,
     but by time

Insertion of "The Interrogation Of The Man Of Many Hearts" at this point in the collection—between the awakening poems and the consummation poem—immediately elevates the meditations to a plane of high seriousness, from erotic romance to profound realism.

The rest of the poems in Love Poems are in fact rays from this initial cluster. A second sequence can be discerned in which the subject is the sexual awakening of the woman. "Song For A Red Nightgown" is the lightly humorous attempt at a precise description of a woman's night dress, the costume that signals the change from caterpillar to butterfly: "the butterfly owns her now." In another poem, "It Is A Spring Afternoon," the girl senses the change of seasons as parallel to her own profound and silent maturing. She falls in love with her new body, "her animal loveliness," in a series of healing and healthy images:

      Because of this
      the ground, that winter nightmare,
      has cured its sores and burst
      with green birds and vitamins.
      Because of this
      the trees turn in their trenches
      and hold up little rain cups
      by their slender fingers.
      Because of this
      a woman stands by her stove
      singing and cooking flowers.
      Everything here is yellow and green.

The swiftness and completeness of the transition is expressed in diction borrowed from Robert Frost's poem, "For Once, Then, Something":

     The face of the child wrinkles
     in the water and is gone forever.

The most striking of these "awakening" poems appears at the beginning of the sequence and bears the flagrant title "In Celebration Of My Uterus." The poem fits into the collection only because of the context there. It derives, actually, as the opening lines make clear, from the medical problem Sexton had in 1959, when she feared that she had cancer, the disease from which her mother had recently died. The diagnosis and operation, however, disclosed only a benign tumor which was removed. The event itself was described in clinical detail in the poem called "The Operation" from All My Pretty Ones (1962). But, while the event itself happened several years before the affair began (as dated in Love Poems), still we may judge that this celebration of her womanly sexuality, where "each cell has a life," has been successfully inserted into its present place in the volume. The poem has been noticed by others, and while it may not be her strongest one there are elements in it that suggest a further respect for Anne Sexton's poetry as a whole. From this point of view, the Whitmanesque diction of the poem assumes primary importance. She invents a twelve-item catalogue, for example, of typical women; toward the end of the poem, the same phrase "Let me …" introduces eight separate lines of rhythmically parallel syntax; further, the Whitmanesque word "sing" and its variations occur prominently some half-dozen times, as does Whitman's divine "I am" phrase. Where Whitman celebrates the phallus, Sexton assumes the role of female counterpart, celebrating the uterus. There are reasons for seeing Sexton in the tradition of Whitman; she creates a female singer of the Self to match his male persona.

A third sequence of poems can be discerned later in the volume, celebrating the affair at its height. Leaving open the possibility that other poems and parts of poems touch the same subject, we can list the following as poems which follow without interruption in this sequence: "Now," "Us," "Mr. Mine," "Song For A Lady," and "Knee Song." The poems are characterized by innocence and spontaneity, by the security that the moment of love is eternal. In such a situation, play is the characteristic activity: "We are here on a raft, exiled from dust." The motifs rise to a high point in the final poem, where Molly Bloom's soliloquy is mined for dramatic effect: "Yes oh yes yes yes … yes yes yes." The poems are lovely as erotic celebration. The sensual details are fresh and moving. "Song For A Lady" is a small gem of a song intricately rhymed. But even within this sequence can be heard time's winged chariot, which chills all lovers. Crystalized in a unique trope, this startling image is her version of the carpe diem theme:

    The shoemaker will come and he will rebuild
    this room. He will lie on your bed
    and urinate and nothing will exist.
    Now is the time. Now!

This suggests the theme of a fourth discernible sequence in Love Poems, a series of poems on the bitter aftermath of the affair. Once again, Sexton's placement of the poems is telling. Actually, this series comes third among the four sequences I have been suggesting, after the awakening poems and immediately before the fulfillment poems just described. It is as if Sexton would mold our responses to a harsh reality, as she had in the opening sequence of five poems: the most intense sensual pleasures are the most compelling reminders of our temporariness. It is as if Sexton were holding herself to the fire to find all the wisdom she could in a moment that was as transitory as it was beautiful. The poems that follow without interruption in this sequence are "Just Once," "Again And Again And Again," "You All Know The Story Of The Other Woman," and "Moon Song, Woman Song," The sequence is ended by the powerful "Ballad Of The Lonely Masturbator."

The first poem, which was actually written and published several years earlier, describes the affair as definitely over and ends with the irony that "these constants" are now "gone." The following poems are filled with bitterness: a frog "sits on my lips and defecates"; "the blackness is murderous"; she senses herself as having been used and abandoned; all lovers are "full of lies. / They are eating each other." On first reading, it is perhaps "The Ballad Of The Lonely Masturbator" which strikes the reader as most original, but the poem that precedes it may have profounder rewards. "Moon Song, Woman Song" is a meditation into the ancient archetype of the moon as woman, virgin, goddess, the betrayed lover. The poem sets the speech in the mouth of the moon:

    I have been oranging and fat,
    carrot colored, gaped at,
    allowing my cracked o's to drop on the sea …

The male is present in the poem as violator, "tall in your battle dress." The opposition of figures is ancient and worth considering again, but for this most recent version of the story Sexton suggests a modern context that strikingly authenticates the perennial applicability of the archetypal story. The male is lightly suggested as astronaut by the phrases "coverall man" and "blast off," and the moon passively awaits still another rough assault from him. The poem ends with a further insight; the ends of the male and the female are eternally unreconcilable: for him she is only "headquarters of an area," whereas she sees herself as "house of a dream."

Tight as the generic unity is, two poems seem to resist inclusion in Love Poems. The first is called "The Break," and since it follows "For My Lover, Returning To His Wife," the title suggests a smooth sequence of events. But the poem is an account of the broken hip she actually suffered from an accidental fall downstairs, on November 9, 1966. The fall and the subsequent operation were to leave her a virtual invalid for nearly a year. The muses of poetry were handing her difficult materials to transmute into a series of love poems. But poetry has rules that are different from those of biography and another careful reading is required for signs of Sexton's intention in placing the poem here. A key phrase appears: "I'm Ethan Frome's wife,' and the reader recalls the end of Edith Wharton's story, where the two intense lovers are crippled and embittered finally, with the betrayed wife left to move them around at whim. The poem then suggests guilt and the fear of retribution, of poetic justice: a broken hip is the "right" punishment for an adulterous relationship. An earlier allusion, to Icarus, in line 13 confirms this suggestion of poetic justice. Congruent with this point of entry is the contrast, developed throughout the poem, between the broken hip and the broken heart. The poem begins, "It was also my violent heart that broke"; it ends with the acceptance of reality of her situation, the broken hip and "the violent heart." Her final comment draws on the phrase from the New Testament (John 2:17) to summarize her situation: "The zeal / of my house doth cat me up"—the driving energies of the violent heart have somehow resulted in the crack-up of the body. The seven other references to "heart" in this poem confirm the connection. The heart, "old hunger motor," "thought it could call all the shots." "The heart burst with love and lost its breath." With some problems, then, the poem inserts itself within the thematic patterns of Love Poems, suggesting that the love is a guilty one, that such overreaching cannot long escape the notice of the gods. If this is the intent of the poem, as it finds its place in Love Poems, then two lines in the third stanza arrest the attention:

      Yes, I was like a box of dog bones.
      But now they've wrapped me in like a nun.

In the last collection of poems she was to see through the press, The Awful Rowing Toward God, her love becomes a mystical love for the divine; her use of "Ms. Dog" indicates some marital relation to its reverse, "God." The lines above suggest some earlier beginning of this perception; the failure of human love isolates her for the divine.

The second poem which resists inclusion into the unity of Love Poems is "The Papa And Mama Dance." The poem is the recollection of a fictional brother and herself, as children, dressing in their parents' old clothes, and engaging in some intensely incestuous behavior. Sexton had no brother and the fantasy is the same as those found in other volumes of her poetry, in "To Johnny Pole On The Forgotten Beach" in To Bedlam And Part Way Back (1960), and in the Christopher poems in The Death Notebooks (1974). These poems, including the present one, are like the other moments when Sexton manufactures "autobiography" for the more intense personalization of her experiences. While "The Papa And Mama Dance," then, seems to come from another corner of the poet's mind, it is worth recalling that the convention of lovers pretending to be brother and sister, to heighten the erotic intimacy of the relationship, is at least as old as the Song of Solomon. There is, in addition, another detail which ties this poem to the present collection. It begins with the sister criticizing the brother for not burning his draft card, for going off to war instead. In the concluding sequence of the book, the poem "December 9th," she complains to her lover:

     Two years ago, Reservist,
     you would have burned
     your draft card …

This poem as well, then, has multiple ties to the collection in which it appears.

An early reviewer of Love Poems complained that the volume seemed to him to suffer from hasty construction, and that "most of the poems seem to have been written far too quickly, as if she were rather nervous of overcooking emotional raw material." It can be argued, however, that just the opposite is true, that the materials of the collection are quite cooled, quite thoroughly manipulated and artistically arranged, that the impression of raw emotion was precisely the one the poet was eager to convey. For example, the reader of Linda Gray Sexton's book, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters, comes to realize that two poems, "The Nude Swim" and "Loving the Killer," derive their setting and quite likely their personae from Anne's European trips with her husband. Still another poem, "Just Once," fits the composite picture of Love Poems perfectly, but it was first published in 1958, several years before the affair began according to the internal datings of the volume. The raw experience has been cooked here quite thoroughly. Sexton had a talent for "pseudobiography," for the presentation of her poems as if they were raw emotional experiences. What embarrassed some early critics even as unsanctionable invasion of her own privacy turned out, at least at times, to be an intense fictional realism, the inventive talent of the poet-storyteller.

Love Poems, then, merges the possibilities of the ancient genre of erotic love poetry with the immediacy of modern experience. The contours of the genre which Sexton has emphasized are the awakening, the experience, the enjoyment and celebration of love, with the bitter aftermath of the definitive break as the controlling context for the whole. Individual poems are alive with a pulse of their own; the cool, ironic encadrement is the timeless theme of Mutability.