ANNE SEXTON: THE

TRUTH THE DEAD

KNOW
By: Asztalos Tamara, III. year,
Hungarian-English
Anne Sexton
◦ known for her highly personal, confessional verse

◦ Pulitzer Prize in 1967 for Live or Die

◦ long battle with depression, suicidal tendencies

◦ intimate details from her private life: husban children

The Truth the Dead Know
◦ Confessional elegy: death of her parents
◦ Mother: died March 1959
◦ Father: died June 1959
◦ The grief was too much to bear
◦ Didn’t attend the funeral

„Gone, I say and walk from church,

refusing the stiff procession to the grave,
letting the dead ride alone in the hearse. „
Themes
◦ Death: she broods over death as a whole

◦ Vanity of life: she cannot find the significance of life. Death topples
everything. The bodies become an embodiment of stone

◦ „memento mori”: „remember you have to die”. - “In another country, people
die” “Men kill for this, or for as much”
◦ Seeking out to Cape – she needs the distance from the physical reminders of her loss

◦ Speaker and her partner („My darling”) are able to grow closer

◦ They „touch” – heal

◦ Healing one another

◦ Last stanza: returns to the „dead”

◦ Rhetorical question: „And what of the dead”

◦ The bodies of the loved ones “lie without shoes / in the stone boats,” – unanble to
move –lack of shoes.
◦ Dead does not respond, , it is senseless

◦ The possible truth the dead know is senselessness, nothing and void

◦ The tone is pessimistic, the subject matters

◦ Dead is sailing away, but haunts her

◦ The sea could also become dead, but as frozen as stone

 THANK YOU FOR
YOUR ATTENTION!