T.j Stokes
English 2010
K. Kimball
Forgiven flaws in Anne Sexton’s Poem All My Pretty Ones
Anne Sexton’s “All My Pretty One’s” can be first interpreted as a poem written by a
woman that had just lost her father, and was very sad. As the poem goes on you can feel a turn
from sadness turn into anger due to her father’s drinking and wanting to marry another woman.
Anne only speaks of herself, father and mother in this poem, so clearly the issues arise from
those three characters. The action is subtle but clearly the tone Anne uses tells us that she has a
few mixed emotions about her father. In the last two paragraphs you get the feeling that she is
not fully at peace with her father and the life he led.
What was her father missing from his life, that he was unable to be a great dad to Anne
and chose to drink his life away. Why did his sorrow keep him from trying to make her and her
mother a priority. It’s easy to see that her father never knew his father so he had personal issues
that took away from his family. She talks of cleaning his residence that he could not afford so he
was living out of his means. Perhaps this was her first time seeing these photos and scrapbooks
that her father had so she had no way to understand her father.
Anne’s tone towards her father could also be interpreted as her actually having a drinking
problem as well that has taken her mother and fathers lives. Anne says “I hold a five-year diary
that my mother kept for three years, telling all she does not say of your alcoholic tendency. You
overslept, she writes. My God, father, each Christmas Day with your blood, will I drink down
your glass of wine? The diary of your hurly-burly years goes to my shelf to wait for my age to
pass. Only in this hoarded span will love persevere. Whether you are pretty or not, I outlive you,
bend down my strange face to yours and forgive you” (Anne Sexton). It could seem that she was
struggling with her own problem but combined with the rest of the text I feel that the focus is on
T.j Stokes
English 2010
K. Kimball
her father’s addiction and her trying to come to terms with her feelings about him. She says “My
father, time meanwhile has made it unimportant who you are looking for” (Anne Sexton). To me
this reinforces that she never understood her father and therefore could not make sense of his
actions. If it was a shared mutual addiction I believe she would have tied the two together more
instead of focusing on her father and the effects it had on her mother.
The struggle with alcohol and her father not knowing his own father is reflected in this
paragraph “This is the yellow scrapbook that you began
the year I was born; as crackling now and wrinkly
as tobacco leaves: clippings where Hoover outran
the Democrats, wiggling his dry finger at me
and Prohibition; news where the Hindenburg went
down and recent years where you went flush
on war. This year, solvent but sick, you meant
to marry that pretty widow in a one-month rush.
But before you had that second chance, I cried
on your fat shoulder. Three days later you died.”
“Here, by our kennel of dogs with their pink eyes,
running like show-bred pigs in their chain-link pen;
here, at the horseshow where my sister wins a prize;
Now I fold you down, my drunkard, my navigator,
my first lost keeper, to love or look at later”.
Anne’s relationship with her father seemed very disturbing. She had many unanswered
questions about him and clearly saw him as a very lost man. It was not all sad though, she found
T.j Stokes
English 2010
K. Kimball
a bit of resolution by his death. She could finally forgive him for his flaws and even though she
may have been upset with him she could let that anger go. Many times people pass and we have
so much we would like to say but once they are gone we have to get that closure anyway we can
and drop the grudges we held or we too might become lost in our own anger. The climax was her
father’s addiction but ultimately death resolved the issue by forcing her to now have to go
through his personal belongings and reflect on memories.