Anne Sexton
â€œAll My Pretty Onesâ€ is the title poem of Anne Sextonâ€™s intensely confessional second book of poetry, All My Pretty Ones (1962), and it reflects that volumeâ€™s absorption with loss and death. This poem consists of five ten-line stanzas and resembles the form of most of the companion poems in the volume. The poemâ€™s title comes from William Shakespeareâ€™s Macbeth (1606), when Macduff mourns the loss of his wife and children. In March of 1959, Anne Sextonâ€™s mother died, followed in June of the same year by Sextonâ€™s father. â€œAll My Pretty Onesâ€ is a monologue addressed to Sextonâ€™s dead father as she sorts through her parentsâ€™ possessions.,In the first stanza, Sexton looks over her fatherâ€™s meager â€œleftoversâ€: a key, some stock certificates, clothing, a car, his will, and a box of photographs. She is recording a moment that many children must endure: the closing of a parentâ€™s affairs, the moment when the living children must literally discard artifacts not only of their parentsâ€™ lives but also of their own. She sees her task as one of helping her father to free himself from the tangles of his now past life. The stanza concludes with her decision to throw away the items that she has subsequently found. [...]
Poetry,Classics,Literature,American,Fiction,Feminism,Literature,20th Century,Mental Health,Mental Illness,Womens
All My Pretty Ones