Read Anywhere and on Any Device!

Subscribe to Read | $0.00

Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!

Create Free Account

All My Pretty Ones

4.2/5 ( ratings)

“All My Pretty Ones” is the title poem of Anne Sexton’s intensely confessional second book of poetry, All My Pretty Ones , and it reflects that volume’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 poem’s title comes from William Shakespeare’s Macbeth , when Macduff mourns the loss of his wife and children. In March of 1959, Anne Sexton’s mother died, followed in June of the same year by Sexton’s father. “All My Pretty Ones” is a monologue addressed to Sexton’s dead father as she sorts through her parents’ possessions.

In the first stanza, Sexton looks over her father’s meager “leftovers”: 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 parent’s affairs, the moment when the living children must literally discard artifacts not only of their parents’ 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. [...]

Language: English

Pages: 68

Format: Paperback

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Release: October 30, 2008

ISBN: 0395081777

ISBN 13: 9780395081778

All My Pretty Ones

4.2/5 ( ratings)

“All My Pretty Ones” is the title poem of Anne Sexton’s intensely confessional second book of poetry, All My Pretty Ones , and it reflects that volume’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 poem’s title comes from William Shakespeare’s Macbeth , when Macduff mourns the loss of his wife and children. In March of 1959, Anne Sexton’s mother died, followed in June of the same year by Sexton’s father. “All My Pretty Ones” is a monologue addressed to Sexton’s dead father as she sorts through her parents’ possessions.

In the first stanza, Sexton looks over her father’s meager “leftovers”: 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 parent’s affairs, the moment when the living children must literally discard artifacts not only of their parents’ 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. [...]

Language: English

Pages: 68

Format: Paperback

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Release: October 30, 2008

ISBN: 0395081777

ISBN 13: 9780395081778

More books from Anne Sexton

The Complete Poems

4.2/5 ( ratings)

Selected Poems

4.2/5 ( ratings)

Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters

4.2/5 ( ratings)

Live or Die

4.1/5 ( ratings)

The Awful Rowing Toward God

4.2/5 ( ratings)

To Bedlam and Part Way Back

4.2/5 ( ratings)

The Death Notebooks

4.1/5 ( ratings)

Complete Poems

4.4/5 ( ratings)

45 Mercy Street

3.9/5 ( ratings)

Mercies: Selected Poems

4.2/5 ( ratings)

Eight American Poets: An Anthology

No Evil Star: Selected Essays, Interviews, and Prose

Anne Sexton Reads

4.6/5 ( ratings)

This Is Not a Confession

4.7/5 ( ratings)

El libro de la locura

3.7/5 ( ratings)

The Wizard's Tears

Novembar tela i kalendara: izabrane pesme

4.6/5 ( ratings)

L'estrosa abbondanza

4.2/5 ( ratings)

Poesie su Dio

4.1/5 ( ratings)

آن ها مشغول مردن اند

2.3/5 ( ratings)

Rate this book!

Write a review?