Tati Gervase
March 13, 2014
As a child grows older, they learn morals and life lessons through their parents and stories. However, children are often guarded from the truth, or given white lies as to protect them from the “real world”. The world is full or war, lies, betrayal, and pain, and parents and other adults often try to protect a child’s innocence from being corrupted by that. Nevertheless, others believe that ignorance is destruction and will harm humanity more than it will help them. Many poets, authors and critics often exploit the harsh truth of the world, and Anne Sexton is among the poets that explicit the truth in her poems. In her poems, “Courage” and “Cinderella”, Sexton reveals the difference between what it means to live life or live as a skeleton with lies.
Anne Sexton grew up as the third child to a materialistic mother and an alcoholic father.
Later, she married an “unimaginative man” and had two children with him (Courage).
Unfortunately, after giving birth to her second child, she developed post-partum depression and went through many hospitals, treatments, and therapists. However, one therapist told Sexton to use writing as a way to express how she was feeling, so she started writing poetry. Oftentimes, many critics state how Sexton used her own experiences to write her poems because they are often “nakedly autobiographical” (Courage). For example, in her poem “Courage”, it “is an idealized version in which the individual is at once a martyr to and savior of herself”, which means she used that poem to create the person she wants to be. However, her other poem,
“Cinderella” is not so much as autobiographical as it is therapeutic because she “weaves her therapeutic baskets, the terrible threads of her private mythology” (Phillips). Her torturous past and life led her to create a pain-filled and twisted milieu into her poems. A greater number of her poems feature pain and death because that was all she ever knew, and all she ever felt.

Sexton uses an abundance of techniques to communicate her ideas through her poems.
She is seen as a dark and twisted poet who oftentimes writes about wicked plots and stories. Her poetry “repelled a good many” while would have read it because of its original and unique style.
Those who read her poems know that the words seem friendly and buoyant at first, but Sexton is a satirical poet, so there is much more meaning hidden in the lines. Her meaning is dark and changes the perception on how the reader looks at other events in life. For example, in line 107 of “Cinderella”, Sexton writes “their darling smiles pasted on for eternity” (Sexton). This line would first make them seem happy because they have smiles, but the negative connotation of
“pasted smiles” shows that the prince and princess’s smiles are fake and forced. This changes how the reader looks at the clichéd Disney and brings a new perspective to the Grimm story. Her use of denotation and connotation she uses in her poems, Anne Sexton is a satirical poet.
Additionally, she engulfs her poem with figurative language, commonly in the form similes, metaphors, personification and allusions. She uses these to allow the reader to connect to her writing. For example, “Courage” personifies death by saying, “death opens the back door”, which is an action almost everyone makes every day (line 45). “Cinderella” alludes to a popular children’s book where the main characters are named the Bobbsey Twins, who were two sets of twins frozen in time throughout the series. Figuartive language is language in which audiences understand and connect to, and Sexton uses it to connect them to the lifeless and paralyzed prince and princess in “Cinderella” and the bravado, but then courageous “you” in “Courage”.
Anne Sexton uses an abundance of techniques to create depth and meaning into her poems, but what are the meanings in her poems? In “Courage” the poem is about the growth of a person from showing bravado to sincerely having courage; however, it is also “an idealized version in which the individual is at once a martyr to and savior of herself” which means courage

is about finding him or herself. “Courage” states that putting on a brave face is not courage, but being able to identify who someone is as an individual is courage. However, while “Courage” has a more positive message, “Cinderella” puts a dark spin on a Disney classic. She makes the characters in the poem absolutely lifeless and fake, and there is no happy ending which is what is often assumed with fairy tales. She makes it seem as though “the institution of marriage, is really a deathly stasis”, connecting this poem to her failed marriage in her own life.
The truth is often a scary concept, as many people find the pain that sometimes comes with it too much. Anne Sexton believes that people need to know the truth, or the truth in her opinion, and she expresses her thoughts through her poems. In “Courage” she compares the differences between bravado and courage. How courage is about finding individuality, while bravado is putting on a brave face to bullies. And how fairy tales may seem like the perfect story, but there is always more than meets the eye. The perfect story may end lifelessly and still, and true happiness may not be possible. Even though these messages are dark and dank, they come from a hurting poet who had lived a troublesome life, and ultimately could not live with the pain anymore. Henceforth, because of her suicidal death, Semansky considers the possibility that her
“final act was one of courage”, but it is “left for her readers to decide”.