SOURCE: "Mysticism and Suicide: Anne Sexton's Last Poetry," in Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 68, No. 3, Fall, 1985, pp. 335-56.

Schweigen. Wer inniger schwieg rührt an die Wurzeln der Rede.

—Rilke

And Rilke, think of Rilke with his terrible pain.

—Anne Sexton

When Anne Sexton died in 1974, she had just produced what she intended to be her final book of poems. The Awful Rowing Toward God. Before that volume the direction of her work was unclear. There had been seven earlier books of poetry, beginning with the forceful and unsettling poems of To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960). Her signature was the clear line of personal narrative; but it was frequently not clear whether the narratives were true biography or a kind of artistically manipulated pseudo-biography. She became famous, with the Pulitzer Prize in 1966, and the reader became familiar with such frequently anthologized poems as "Unknown Girl in the Maternity Ward," "The Truth the Dead Know," "The Farmer's Wife," and "The Abortion." We knew her voice, but each poem seemed an unrelated victory. Her early classification among the "confessional poets" never seemed to confer the insights it had promised. One fellow poet dismissed her work as garbage; at the other pole, Sandra Gilbert canonized her divine madness in an essay entitled "Jubilate Anne."

The reader's reward was finally The Awful Rowing Toward God, the book of a mature poet whose dedication to art was single-minded and supreme, who could finally declare with utter simplicity "I am in love with words." Sexton had prepared and intended The Awful Rowing Toward God as a posthumous publication. A year before she died she told an interviewer that she had written the first drafts of these poems in two and a half weeks, that she would continue to polish them, but that she would allow publication only after her death. Her published letters add the chilling information that she had then sent the manuscript to her publisher and was actually reading the galley proofs on the day she took her own life.

The volume gains authority as Anne Sexton's intended final work. The shape and direction of her poetic career finally becomes clear. Clear also is the grim fact that the suicide is a consciously intended part of the book. We miss her meaning, the total program she provided for her reader to experience, without this stark fact.

As the "Rowing" of the title suggests, the image of the Sea pervades this collection; and it soon becomes obvious that this metaphorical Sea is the carrier for one of the most profound and pervasive ideas of western culture.

One of Sexton's earliest reviewers noticed the prominence of the Sea in her work, and when a later interviewer asked her about it she affirmed its personal importance to her. She was a New Englander: the sea was in her history and in her daily experience. The imagery aligns her, also, with some of the most prominent American writers. Emily Dickinson was another virtually land-locked lady in whose poetry the Sea is pervasive. The New England tradition was remembered as having begun with a dangerous adventure across the unknown ocean; the culture was supported throughout its history by commerce on the sea. For Sexton personally, the sea was escape and renewal, where the family had vacationed since her childhood. It is both a danger and life-support system. In most of her poetry it is also the setting for the journey of the soul. The phrase most often quoted by the reviewers from her early books was the one she retrieved from Kafka and used as epigraph for All My Pretty Ones: "… a book should serve as the axe for the frozen sea within us."

In her final volume this Sea becomes warm with swarming life. The two poems which begin and end the collection, "Rowing" and "The Rowing Endeth," set up a framework of sea-exploration, and there are overt references to the Sea in two-thirds of the poems. The Sea is quite literally the fluid medium in which the mental life of this poetry takes place. The first poem begins with the emergence of the Self from non-being; the child is gradually able to do more human things but feels itself still "undersea all the time." We are only seven pages into the collection when the perception becomes clear that the Sea is the source of all life:

       From the sea came up a hand,
       ignorant as a penny,
       troubled with the salt of its mother,
       mute with the silence of the fishes,
       quick with the altars of the tides,
       and God reached out of His mouth
       and called it man.
       Up came the other hand
       and God called it woman.
       The hands applauded.
       And this was no sin.
       It was as it was meant to be.

There is a calm rightness carrying this statement along, a sense of order, and—new for Sexton—an untroubled account of the invention of sexuality. The poem achieves dignity and authority by its imitation of Biblical diction.

But the Sea is not only origin; it is also metaphor for the continuing flow of life within the human being. Sexton, for example, perceives the pulse that beats in her arteries as "the sea that bangs in my throat." The figure is extended a few pages later, where "the heart / … swallows the tides / and spits them out cleansed." The Sea is simultaneously within and without. Even the ears are "conch shells," fashioned to bring in the sound of the Sea constantly to human consciousness. This seems to intimate that human beings live in a Sea of Life, but if one knows that the conch shell really amplifies the rush of the blood within the hearer, then this line also indicates that the Sea of Life is within.

There are negative elements in this massive symbolic Seaworld. On the margin between sea and land, between spirit and matter, are the crab who causes painful cancer, the sand flea who might enter the ear and cause madness in the brain, the turtle who furnishes an image of human sloth and insensitivity. There is also the land itself which supports human iniquity and furnishes images for spiritual dryness and desolation. But in this world the margin between sea and land is also creative; it is the area where "the sea places its many fingers on the shore" and opposites can interact. The sea is necessary "mother," as the earth is necessary "father," and without interaction between the two there is no life.

Still another perception unfolds as Sexton explores her seasubject: "Perhaps the earth is floating" on the Sea. The world of matter floats on the Sea of spirit and life; and so that Sea is never far off from any of us. Even the earthbound can dig wells in the middle of the desert, and tap into that Sea, as the Sphinx advises the poet to do in another poem:

    I found the well [of God]
    … and there was water,
    and I drank,
    … Then the well spoke to me.
    It said: Abundance is scooped from abundance,
    Yet abundance remains.

The appreciative reader has now arrived, at this point in the book, at the ancient literary perception of a metaphoric Sea that surrounds and animates all life with a creative vitality, the fluid medium in which things live and move and have their being, a creative "Abundance" prodigal of its forms. This is the same perception that is behind much literature that can be described as "Romantic," "Enthusiastic," or in any way "Mystical."

These figures and tropes carry us to one of Sexton's most moving poems, the only poem in the collection in which the obvious and awaited word "Logos" appears:

     When man
     enters woman,
     like the surf biting the shore,
     again and again,
     and the woman opens her mouth in pleasure
     and her teeth gleam
     like the alphabet,
     Logos appears milking a star,
     and the man
     inside of woman
     ties a knot
     so that they will
     never again be separate
     and the woman
     climbs into a flower
     and swallows its stem
     and Logos appears
     and unleashes their rivers.

Sexton recapitulates twenty-five centuries of western erotic mysticism here, where the imagery of the Song of Solomon merged early with the worship of the Torah, and then developed through the writings of St. John the Divine into the Logos Christology of the Greek Fathers, who were themselves influenced by Plato's lovely idea, in the Timaeus, of the world as divine creative Body. Divine creative energy, which unleashes itself in permanent joyous activity, has—according to the poem—its momentary analogue in human ecstasy: the human being can, at least briefly during intercourse, "reach through / the curtain of God" to participate by immediate contact in the creative flow of life.

Image carries idea. The most important function of the Sea images in The Awful Rowing Toward God is to carry the items that produce this Logos mysticism as Sexton's final achievement, the final life-conferring idea her work came to embody.

One of the most important poems in this personal synthesis then becomes the strange one called "The Fish that Walked." The title introduces the scenario: a fish enters the human element for a period, finds the place "awkward" and "without grace": "There is no rhythm / in this country of dirt" he says. But the experience stimulates deep memories in the poet-observer, of her own vague pre-existence in the Sea, floating in "the salt of God's belly," with deep longings "for your country, fish." In view of the Logos poem which immediately precedes it, this poem is not so strange. With its allusions to grace and to the traditional symbol of fish as Christ, this is Anne Sexton's highly personal version of the Logos made flesh and dwelling among men. Sexton asserts that she herself has enjoyed the mystical experience of living in the flowing life of the Divine: the poem ends with conversation between the lady-poet and the fish-Logos.

Sexton's Logos-intuition is itself creative, generating further imaginative work. More developments follow, and more connections are made. God is incomplete without a body, for example: according to a poem called "The Earth,"

    God owns heaven,
    but He craves the earth
    … but most of all He envies the bodies,
    He who has no body.

And in a later poem in the collection, the Logos would like to be incarnated more than once:

     I have been born many times, a false Messiah,
     but let me be born again
     into something true.

Such a world, in which the Logos is the Sea where the poet lives, is charged with Personality or Personhood. Near the end of the collection a poem begins

     I cannot walk an inch
     without trying to walk to God.
     I cannot move a finger
     without trying to touch God.

The grounds here are those of mystics and theologians who have perceived the Logos as eternally existing, responsible for the creation of the physical world, and responsible also for preventing its lapse back into non-being.

The image of the Sea, as it merges into the idea of the Logos, is thus the underlying metaphor that gives The Awful Rowing Toward God its largest meaning and its undeniable power: the Sea-Logos gives life initially, sustains and supports it, and finally receives it back. The Sea-Logos is the personalized arena for the struggle of the human mind; it is as well the goal of the human mind and affections. And the poet's consciousness is at the center of this world. Her genius comes alive in this vital connection with its source. With this collection Anne Sexton's work creates a highly personal synthesis of the mystical potential in Western civilization.

It is startling to find such traditional piety in the sophisticated lady whose conversation was sprinkled with conventional obscenities, whose trademark was the ever-present pack of Salems. In the photographs that accompany her works she is immaculately groomed, expensively dressed, posing against a glassed-in sunporch amid wicker furniture and potted plants. If this is the setting of anguish, it seems mockingly ironic. On the evidence of the photographs one might almost accuse Anne Sexton of self-indulgence; we might almost agree with one of her early critics that she is "a poet without mystical inclinations." But her voice is deeply formed from layers of authentic experience. Style in this last volume has grown lean and precise, the presentation of a personal idiom.

It is surprising also to find the lady so learned in the tradition. She despised her formal education: "I'm not an intellectual of any sort I know of…. I had never gone to college, I absolutely was a flunk-out in any schooling I had, I laughed my way through exams…. And until I started at twenty-seven, hadn't done much reading." Her comments led one sympathetic friend to write (mistakenly, I think): "Nor was Sexton a particularly reflective or intellectual person. She came to poetry late, to learning even later, and though she worked hard to educate herself, she never acquired a vocabulary to discuss her ideas on a level of enduring interest or value." But the reader emerges from The Awful Rowing Toward God with the sense of having been put deeply in touch with the tradition of letters and religious sensibility; she embodies both the length and the richness of that tradition.

For example, the title, The Awful Rowing Toward God seems to arrest with its overtones from Emily Dickinson, some of whose love poems feature images of rowing to safe harbor. And, indeed, one of the first impressions that the book makes is that it recapitulates the American experience in literature. The myth from Poe's Eureka is reflected in these lines: "I will take a crowbar / and pry out the broken / pieces of God in me." She repeats Whitman in calling her poems "a song of myself." The later voice of T. S. Eliot can surely be heard in these lines:

     Listen.
     We must all stop dying in the little ways,
     in the craters of hate,
     in the potholes of indifference—
     a murder in the temple.
     The place I live in
     is a kind of maze
     and I keep seeking
     the exit or the home.
     Yet if I could listen
     to the bulldog courage of those children
     and turn inward into the plague of my soul
     with more eyes than the stars
     I could melt the darkness….

There must be a nod to Thoreau's personified pond as she notices "the pond wearing its mustache of frost." There is direct engagement with one of Emily Dickinson's poems when she says, "Perhaps I am no one." The American Indian legacy is briefly regarded as she imagines a reservation with "their plastic feathers, / the dead dream" and tries herself to revitalize those Indian dreams of fire, vulture, coyote, and wren. The great American writers are also apparent in the sea imagery on almost every page of The Awful Rowing Toward God. She extends as well an American writer's interest in evolution: the two themes emerge in one poem, where "the sea … is the kitchen of God."

But she can be found even more intensely among the Modernist concerns of the century. She sounds like Yeats early in her collection: "[the children] are writing down their life / on a century fallen to ruin." She has learned the modern temper from Kierkegaard and in one poem gives her own personal version of "The Sickness Unto Death." She has learned from Beckett to construct scenarios of the Absurd with her own life as the text. She has learned the metaphysical seriousness of The Seventh Seal of Ingmar Bergman: the last poem of this collection imagines Sexton playing her royal flush against the lyrically wild cards of God. She has learned from Lowell, Berryman, and Snodgrass so to liberate her writing as to match the tones and concerns of modern inner speech. The language taboos are broken through: the banal reductions of ordinary speech are as telling, in context, as were the flights of fancy in former times. Formal structures of versification in her final work are valid only for the individual poem—each poem has its own form.

The Awful Rowing Toward God embodies a stratum of even deeper and longer historical traditions. What will make the poetry of Anne Sexton permanently valid is her modernization of the perennial meditative wisdom of the West. C. S. Lewis said many years ago that "Humanity does not pass through phases as a train passes through stations: being alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind." Heaven and hell remain useful for the mind to locate itself, even for a population without the "faith" to regard them as actual places. Anne Sexton's last volume presents a very personalized compendium of the permanent wisdom of the West, of those questions that frame our enquiry, those values that are constantly meditated on in our solitude. She has written her own psalm sequences, her own proverbs of wisdom. She can look at traces of evil within and strike a playful explanation from the first text of Western Literature: "Not meaning to be [evil], you understand, / just something I ate." The fabric is densely woven by a woman of "little education."

The Awful Rowing Toward God describes not only perception of the Logos, but also the traditional journey of the ascetic soul towards encounter. A voice present from the earliest volumes reiterates the neurotic intensity of her perceptions, the hyper-sensitivity produced by inner disorder. But in this final book the voice that had earliest spoken her madness now seems cultivated for insight. The room where she writes has become sacred and magical: the electric wall sockets are perhaps "a cave of bees," the phone takes root and flowers, "birds explode" outside the window; her typewriter is at the center, with forty-eight eyeballs that never shut; it holds carols for the dance of Joy, songs that come from God. This room of the writer becomes the geographical center of her poems, as her writing becomes the one passion that has mercilessly excluded all others—the lover who had been celebrated in Love Poems, the recently divorced husband, the growing daughters, the friends who have been alienated or abandoned, have all dropped beneath the mental horizon of this collection. Perhaps there is the ruthless egotism that Perry Miller believed he saw in Thoreau, the violent simplification to gain her writer's solitude. But perhaps it is the last instinct of the ascetic, ruthlessly to exclude everything from one's life that suggests this world, that does not furnish essential baggage for the next.

The jourrey within this room begins with savage emptying. Sexton imagines herself as the Witch, a figure from earlier poems now assumed as a personal identity. She goes to her window only to shout "Get out of my life." She imagines herself as old and ridiculous to look at.

     I am shovelling the children out,
     scoop after scoop….
     Maybe I am becoming a hermit,
     opening the door for only
     a few special animals….
     Maybe I have plugged up my sockets
     to keep the gods in …

But it is all required, she says in a magnificent phrase, for "climbing the primordial climb."

In the earliest stages of the climb, the power of evil intrudes and impedes. She senses "the bomb of an alien God":

     The children are all crying in their pens….
     They are old men who have seen too much,
     their mouths full of dirty clothes,
     The tongues poverty, tears like pus.

She takes this evil upon herself and sings the lament of the ancient psalmist:

     God went out of me
     as if the sea had dried up like sandpaper,
     as if the sun had become a latrine.
     God went out of my fingers.
     They became stone.
     My body became a side of mutton
     and despair roamed the slaughterhouse.

As a sufferer herself her compassion expands to all of humanity caught in the hell of a bad dream:

     They are mute.
     They do not cry help
     except inside
     where their hearts are covered with grubs.

And insight arrives with compassion. She senses that her heart is dead, but only because she called it Evil. And further light appears when she sees that physical isolation is an aspect of human misery; in a poem called "Locked Doors" she looks into the human hell: "The people inside have no water / and are never allowed to touch." In the earliest poem in this collection she had already started this theme of isolation:

     Then there was life
     with its cruel house
     and people who seldom touched—
     though touch is all.

Three poems which appear near the center of the collection recapitulate aspects of the journey towards perception of the Logos. The most historically based poem of the collection is called "The Sickness unto Death," and it is a Kierkegaardian meditation on the human sense of loss and isolation, of estrangement from the Sea of Life. What is left is evil, excremental; it must be eaten slowly and bitterly. The poem stands as a pivot at the center of the book and it ends with a turn upwards, with a catharsis:

        tears washed me
       wave after cowardly wave….
       and Jesus stood over me looking down
       and He laughed to find me gone
       and put His mouth to mine
       and gave me His air.

The next poem in this series follows a few pages later and continues this upward development. "The Wall" begins with the paradox that over the millions of years of evolution the only thing that has not changed in nature is the phenomenon of change; mutability is the only constant. It is a part of wisdom to participate consciously in this reality. At the end the poet's voice assumes great authority and formality. She is now the seer who has lived close enough to her experience to emerge with wisdom worth imparting:

     For all you who are going,
     and there are many who are climbing their pain,
     many who will be painted out with a black ink
     suddenly and before it is time,
     for these many I say,
     awkwardly, clumsily,
     take off your life like trousers,
     your shoes, your underwear,
     then take off your flesh,
     unpick the lock of your bones.
     In other words take off the wall
     that separates you from God.

The road upwards, the journey of affirmation, contains moments of joy and vision. The grounding insight, which regulates the rest of the ascent, comes in a third poem called "Is It True?" the longest poem in the collection and also located near the book's center. It is a poem of occupations and blessings for ordinary things, which become transparent and holy. But in the midst of these the poet still senses herself "in this country of black mud" and can see herself as animal, filled with excrement, living in a country which still prosecuted the Vietnam War. The poem begins with the natural instinct of the human to stop his work and look up at the sun occasionally; it ends with looking up to find Christ in the figure of the wounded seagull:

     For I look up,
     and in a blaze of butter is
     Christ,
     soiled with my sour tears,
     Christ,
     a lamb that has been slain,
     his guts drooping like a sea worm,
     but who lives on, lives on
     like the wings of an Atlantic seagull.
     Though he has stopped flying,
     the wings go on flapping
     despite it all,
     despite it all.

The next poem records moments of pure ecstasy, where daily chores and ordinary occupations are permeated with the presence of the divine: "There is joy / in all." She is transported by the impulse "to faint down by the kitchen table / in a prayer of rejoicing." She expands in a poem called "The Big Heart" a few pages later, accepting a new repose at a higher level of reconciliation:

     And God is filling me,
     though there are times of doubt
     as hollow as the Grand Canyon,
     still God is filling me.
     He is giving me the thoughts of dogs,
     the spider in its intricate web,
     the sun
     in all its amazement,
     and the slain ram
     that is the glory,
     the mystery of great cost,
     and my heart,
     which is very big,
     I promise it is very large,
     a monster of sorts,
     takes it all in—
     and in comes the fury of love.

This leads, in the poems that follow, to multiple reconciliations. Friends are gathered around her, valued for their "abundance." Words sometimes fail the poet, but they are "miraculous" nevertheless.

     I am in love with words.
     They are the doves falling out of the ceiling.
     They are six holy oranges sitting in my lap.
     They are the trees, the legs of summer,
     and the sun, its passionate face.

She becomes reconciled with the Mother who had been a harsh presence in earlier volumes; she relives life at the breast, life at the knee, and now feels the strength necessary to face what she calls "the big people's world." The whole of the mystical tradition now becomes her personal domain, and she can speak of the Jesus of Christianity as "the Christ who walked for me."

We must, then, come down to Anne Sexton as a religious poet; critics have found this aspect of her poetry more difficult than her shocking language or her revelation of family secrets. It is quite obvious in the later collections that she becomes progressively more interested in exploring aspects of the western religious tradition. Barbara Kevles was the interviewer who as able to probe most deeply into this aspect of Sexton's experience. In the Paris Review interview of 1971 her gently persistent questions led Sexton to reveal a great deal about her religious experiences. She protested initially that she was not "a lapsed Catholic" as some had conjectured; she was religious on her own Protestant terms. The most starling revelation of this interview was her experience with visions: "I have visions—sometimes ritualized visions—that come of me of God, or of Christ, or of the Saints, and I feel that I can touch them almost … that they are a part of me…. If you want to know the truth, the leaves talk to me every June…. I feel very much in touch with things after I've had a vision. It's somewhat like the beginning of writing a poem; the whole world is very sharp and well defined, and I'm intensely alive…." One recalls the story that Hilda Doolittle told on herself—it was only after she mentioned to Sigmund Freud that she had religious visions that Freud felt she was sufficiently interesting, and sufficiently sick, for him to take her on as a patient. But in this interview Sexton was able to keep religion and mental illness separated at least to her own satisfaction: "When you're mad, [the visions are] silly and out of place, whereas if it's so-called mystical experience, you've put everything in its proper place." She protested that speaking of these things to the interviewer caused her some discomfort and she would prefer to move on to other subjects. But the line of questioning produced this final insight: "I think in time to come people will be more shocked by my mystical poetry than by my so-called confessional poetry."

The mystical poetry has not been universally appreciated. For one hostile critic, the religious poems read like "verbal comicstrips … the pathetic figure of 'Mrs. Sexton' reminds one less of St. Theresa than of Charlie Brown." Another critic, though, could recognize in her the "sacerdotal … a priestess celebrating mysteries," and could use such words as "hieratic … sibyl … vatic."

It may be that Sexton herself was somewhat surprised or even embarrassed by this turn of her interests, this direction of her own growth. At least this seems a possible explanation for her decision to leave the poems for posthumous publication—though the careful reader can already discern seeds of this book, hints of this evolution, in her earlier collections.

We come then finally to deal with Saint Anne, who found the western tradition of spirituality anything but bankrupt. Towards the end of this collection we find that she has been reading the lives of the saints, and that she even has meditations on the three theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity. Faith is initially described as a great weight of information hung on a small wire. The small wire then becomes a thin vein with love pulsing back and forth through it, sustaining the believer with a higher life. The relation is life-giving and life-sustaining, as the twig feeds life to the grape, from another figure in the poem. The ending is dramatically modern, with one of Sexton's reductive banalizing similes: the pulsing vein of faith is man's contract with God, who "will enter your hands / as easily as ten cents used to / bring forth a Coke." The poem is remarkable for its intelligence and its compactness, as well as for its historical sweep.

Two rowing poems bracket this collection and give its title. The two poems are the only ones to use the rowing metaphor. The first is a poem of beginnings: recollections of the crib, dolls, early schoolyears, the gradual recognition of inner pain and loneliness. Consciousness emerges from all of these experiences as if rising from under a sea, gradually discerning God as an island goal. The rower as in a dream fights absurd obstacles, but has the hope of possible calm and resolution at journey's end.

The last poem is full of joy. The rowing has ended, the struggle is over. The surprise in the poem is the game of poker which God requires of the newcomer. He deals her a royal flush, the complete family of cards. But he has tricked her—with a wild card he holds five aces. The game and the trickery serve to release the final tensions of the volume. Laughter spills out and the hoop of his laughter rolls into her mouth, joining God and the Rower in intimate union.

     Then I laugh, the fishy dock laughs,
     the sea laughs. The Island laughs.
     The Absurd laughs.

The poem and the volume end with love for the wild card, the "Dearest dealer," the "eternal … and lucky love."

The Awful Rowing Toward God seems a complex harmonium, a radical simplification achieved at great personal expense. Anais Nin once described her own work as a writer in the following way: "Why one writes is a question I can answer easily, having so often asked it of myself. I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me—the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living. That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art."

The Awful Rowing Toward God is a polished and completed "alternative world," inevitable like every great work of art. It is the personal embodiment of one of the oldest and most invigorating ideas in the Western tradition, the idea of the Logos. She does not die as does Henry James's character Dencombe, in The Middle Years, feeling that he had never completed the artistic work for which his whole life had been a preparation. But her achievement in this book of poems is penultimate; the final action, the suicide, remains to be pondered.

There is a body of scientific theory on the nature of suicide. One socio-psychological theorist begins with questions such as: "Why does man induce so fearful a thing as death when nothing so terrifying as death is imminent?" His assumption is that death is always and in every case "fearful" and "terrifying." Sexton's final work is contrary evidence. "Exhilaration" would be a more appropriate word.

It may be that we are closer to the reality with A. Alvarez. In his extraordinary study of literature and suicide Alvarez writes that "each suicide is a closed world with its own irresistible logic." Each suicide is special, wrapped in its own individual mystery. We must then build a theory for each case, and for a start we may cull a brief anthology of Sexton's comments on death, from her letters to friends:

     "Killing yourself is merely a way to avoid pain."
     "Suicide is the opposite of a poem."
     "Once I thought God didn't want me up there in the
     sky. Now I'm convinced he does."
     "In my opinion Hemingway did the right thing."
     "One writes to forestall being blotted out."
     "I'm so God damned sure I'm going to die soon."

The list is chronological, and though the statements are in ragged prose, unsupported by the framework of a poem, they show progression, from a conventional and guilt-ridden attitude toward suicide to a more open understanding of it. Sexton's ideas on suicide obviously changed as she came closer to her own death.

Much of Sexton's artistic speculation on suicide she herself gathered in her third book of poems, Live or Die (1966), and a full account of the genesis of her thought would have to deal extensively with these explorations. A brief tour through that book produces several direct statements about "the almost unnameable lust" for self-destruction:

     But suicides have a special language.
     Like carpenters they want to know which tools.
     They never ask why build.

Her voyage has already set in that direction. But so in a more general sense has everyone's:

     But surely you know that everyone has a death,
     his own death,
     waiting for him.
     So I will go now without old age or disease….

The last poem of Live or Die was actually called a "hokey" ending to the collection by an unsympathetic reader. But it can be seen as strongly defining the collection. The decision not to take one's life is "a sort of human statement," a celebration

                          of the sun
                the dream, the excitable gift.

It was about this time that Sexton recorded her psychiatrist's plea, "Don't kill yourself. Your poems might mean something to someone else some day." It was as if she sensed a mission still to be completed.

But what may be the most powerful poem in the 1966 volume comes in the center, "To Lose the Earth." The reader is arrested by the epigraph, from Thomas Wolfe:

     To lose the earth you know, for greater knowing;
     to lose the life you have, for greater life;
     to leave the friends you loved for greater loving;
     to find a land more kind than home, more large
     than earth….

The poem itself goes on to conduct the reader's entry into a work of art, and it is a remarkably moving experience. It is an entry into the world of timeless beauty which is elevating and utterly mind-altering. But introduced as it is by the quotation from Wolfe, the poem is ambivalent: it is, equally, the experience of death into which she conducts us. The poem is Sexton's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and "Ode to a Nightingale" stated simultaneously: the lure of death merges with the idea of timeless beauty. It is escape of the Ego, with its Imagination, into the eternal stasis of beauty and truth. Joyce Carol Oates wrote, much more sympathetically, that "Sexton yearned for that larger experience, that rush of near divine certainty that the self is immortal." Freud had already generalized on this phenomenon: "Our unconscious … does not believe in its own death; it behaves as if it were immortal." We need, then, a broader set of categories for suicide.

As a young man Ralph Waldo Emerson speculated quite generously on the variety of motivations leading to suicide, and provided this listing:

It is wrong to say generally that the suicide is a hero or that he is a coward…. The merit of the action must obviously depend in all cases upon the particular condition of the individual. It may be in one the effect of despair, in one of madness, in one of fear, in one of magnanimity, in one of ardent curiosity to know the wonders of the other world.

Emerson's last two categories, startling for a young clergyman, carry us farther towards meanings latent in The Awful Rowing Toward God.

One accomplishment of the collection is an enormous expansion of awareness, of consciousness. As Sexton grows from inner disorder to inner harmony, from madness to poetry, the themes and images of the mystical tradition provide rungs for that "primordial climb." A vast inwardness develops: silence and introspection sculpt the inner world until it matches the larger lineaments of the common tradition of western mysticism. The journey is the dangerous work of solitude:

     One must listen hard to the animal within,
     one must walk like a sleepwalker
     on the edge of the roof,
     one must throw some part of her body
     into the devil's mouth.

The flight from multiplicity, in the search for "the pure, the everlasting, the immortal and unchanging," which Plato described in The Phaedo, results in a sense of accomplishment, of self control and rest, of "being in communion with the unchanging." Sexton comes to embody one form of the long tradition of liberal inquiry and inward search for concepts and values which, as Socrates observed, make human life worth living. There results a sense, as in Poe's Eureka, of the return from fragmentation to unity, to the primordial Paradise, the home of Life, Beauty, Intelligence. The preliminary report of this world can now be tendered by one "in love with words," but the reality itself is fully experienced only when one takes the final step into the Great Silence which climaxes Thoreau's journey in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. To borrow a phrase from Rilke, Sexton "steps, festively clothed, out of the great darkness" of her solitude. She has achieved, in her climactic work, exactly what Emerson called "magnanimity."

It is not enough to say that literature is an imitation of life. It is rather an abstract of life and a forced patterning of life. Time, in art, is stopped, repeatable, arranged, enriched, reversible—as it is not in life. The events that befall a person in a drama or a narrative may be the experiences of a real person in real life. But there is an important difference. In real life the experience is part of a flow; significant experiences are merged with experiences of entirely different meaning or of no apparent meaning at all. The pattern of significance is clouded over by other events. Even the profoundest introspection may not uncover the exact beginning or the final end of the reverberations of an experience. In art, on the other hand, even the most abstract art, there is selectivity and conscious pattern. Art and the life-experience are rarely identical. There are cases where life becomes significant when it tries to imitate art, as closely as possible, as when one might try to live up to a code or an ideal.

Sexton became totally an artist, to the exclusion of any other role, an artist whose medium, in the final event, was her own life. The major actions of her final months seem deliberate attempts at denouement: the final book was shaped to its final order; the final task was to act the finis. How else guarantee the permanence of the accomplishment; how else act authentically on the present state of insight?

The most famous twentieth-century comment on suicide was Albert Camus's, in The Myth of Sisyphus: "There is only one philosophical problem which is truly serious; it is suicide. To judge whether life itself is or is not worth the trouble of being lived—that is the basic question of philosophy." It is generally assumed, in the context of Camus's thought, that suicide would be a negative judgment of the "worth" of life. In Sexton's case the contrary is true.

In Sexton's case, one can see suicide as grounded in "magnanimity," as the result of "ardent curiosity," the self-chosen final capstone to a structure of life and art now satisfactorily completed. Suicide becomes a version of Kierkegaard's leap of faith, a step into what the imagination had seemed, by its harmonizings, to authenticate. Should there be no light beyond, at least the adventurer has left behind a vision of sublime light. Sexton's way is not everyone's, but it has its own rationale and, as artistic vision, its own extraordinary beauty.