DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.
DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

Hassan Malik

February,27,12


The separation of imperfection

Topic: ImperfectionsSubject: The Personification of dislike characteristics in ones self

Issue: Separating yourself as an entity from the imperfections in your characteristic.

 

Claim: Anne Sexton has written the poem "A Curse Against Elegies" as a self-address to something she dislikes and can’t control about herself.  The ‘You’ in this poem is not a separate person, instead it is a personification of the disliked characteristic in herself that she would like to separate from herself and thus, tries to do this in the poem by stating it as a separate entity. The first stanza of the poem is very forward in who it addresses, but it is through the poem that we actually realize that the main addressee is this separate personified characteristic.  The poem begins, ‘Oh, love, why do we argue like this?’  Anne Sexton identifies with the habits and thought process that have lodged themselves into her thinking and she is engaging them in this sentence.  The reader must realize that the ‘we’ are the two different mind frames of the same person and this creates the basis for the conflict within the poem.  Anne Sexton refers to being tired of ‘all [her] pious talk’ and ‘of all the dead.’  Readers understand from this that Anne Sexton is tired of how this separate part of her traps her into the controversies of piety and thoughts of the dead and their morbidity.  The following sentences of the stanza portray the struggle for control over what the mind thinks and show her making an effort to control it, but towards the end readers see that she gives in.  Although the poem is geared to show that the mind is not controllable, throughout the first part it is contradicting its own purpose by trying to render a person trying to controlling it.  The poem, I think, is a means for the poet to relieve herself from blame for the morbid and controversial things she thinks by stating them as something which she cannot control.  By using this poem as a proof that she did try to control herself she’s trying to bring readers to agree with her and this may be a means for her to cope with this disliked characteristic of hers.

 

Reason 1:Anne Sexton also alleviates her responsibilities by stating reasons that cause her to think controversially.  The second stanza begins with ‘Everyone was always to blame:’  This sentence also functions to say that since everyone was to blame, she was not at blame and at fault.  An interesting thing to note is that the first two things she put blame on were objects, the third an insect and the last and only person at blame she chose, was a preacher.  Anne Sexton brings controversy to her poem by giving the preacher a negative role and to top it she writes that he plays a negative role because he does what he does, i.e. he preaches and tries to draw people to religion.  Hence, Anne Sexton is blaming the preacher for pressurizing her towards religion which, in the context of the poem, is the reason for her disturbed mentality.  The last sentence ‘I hid in the kitchen under the ragbag,’ could stand for it’s literal meaning as well as set physical imagery that conveys a similar resemblance to her efforts of avoiding bad thoughts from entering her mind.

 

Reason 2: Up until the last stanza Anne Sexton shows herself trying to control her thoughts.  ‘And the dead are bored with the whole thing,’ is her trying to remove interest from her obsession and again trying to distance herself from it.  The title portrays the uncontrollability too; it is a ‘curse’ against her own poetry.  However, at the end, she does give the mind its free control again referring to it as a ‘You.’  The complexity of this poem is involved with Anne Sexton’s dislike towards her thoughts as well as her need for them to be acceptable without her being at fault.  Most often, society does blame the person for the way s/he thinks because they do not view the mind as an incontrollable separate entity and Anne Sexton attempts to bring this different view so that people can understand her and she can cope with being the way she is.

 

Source: A curse against elegies, Anne Sexton

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.