Anne Sexton No Mercy Street Term Paper

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Anne Sexton's literary success did not provide her with inner peace, and like Plath as well she committed suicide by inhaling poisonous gas ("Biography of Anne Sexton," Poem Hunter, 2008). Prophetically, in Sexton's poem entitled simply "Wanting to Die," she wrote of suicides: "Still-born, they don't always die, / but dazzled, they can't forget a drug so sweet/that even children would look on and smile." However, although most of her poems can be characterized as confessional and psychologically oriented in their subject and tone, not all of them are simply anecdotes from the poet's tormented life. Sexton's willingness to talk about the complicated feelings of mothers, specifically mothers and daughters, was revolutionary for its time, and she also addressed her own issues in light of a long cultural tradition of silencing female voices, as reflected in her poems on fairy tale heroines like Briar Rose and Snow White. "Beauty is a simple passion, but, oh my friends, in the end/you will dance the fire dance in iron shoes," wrote Sexton.

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Her Snow White poem about is about female competition and how the young beauty supplants the old in the tale of "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs." Usually eschewing conventional rhymes and structures, Sexton uses striking images to relate her feelings to the reader in ways that still have impact today, even though her persona is no longer a cultural fixation as it was when she lived. "Let us put your three children/and my two children,/ages ranging from eleven to twenty-one,/and send them in a large air net up to God,/with many stamps, real air mail,/and huge signs attached: / SPECIAL HANDLING./DO NOT STAPLE, FOLD or MUTILATE!" she cries in "The Child Bearers," reflecting both her desire to care for her children, but also to escape the confines of a feminine life devoted to the care of others.

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