All My Pretty Ones by Anne Sexton

First published: 1962, in All My Pretty Ones

Type of poem: Lyric

The Poem

“All My Pretty Ones” is the title poem of Anne Sexton’s intensely confessional second book of poetry, All My Pretty Ones (1962), 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 (1606), 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 found.

In the second stanza, Sexton continues to gaze on the photographs in the box, wondering at the images she sees, unable to identify many of the now long-dead people with any degree of certainty. She looks at a picture of a small boy in a christening gown—is it her father? She wonders if another picture is her great-grandfather. She concludes that her father’s own death renders her search for names irrelevant; now she can never know, because the person who could have told her the importance of each face in the pictures has died. She ends the stanza by locking them—entombing them—in the album and throwing it away.

Stanza 3 continues the sifting and sorting process with a scrapbook that her father had begun the year Sexton was born. It contains memorabilia of historical events such as Prohibition and the crash of the Hindenburg. It also enables Sexton to recall some of her father’s own history, such as his financial good fortune as a result of the war. Sexton swings the focus of the poem back to her father in the stanza’s concluding three lines when she remembers her father’s intention to marry a second time—only months after her mother’s death—and her own distraught response. Her father died three days later.

This reflection forms the bridge to stanza 4, in which Sexton looks at pictures of her parents, photographs that reflect family history as well as family wealth. It is clear from these images that Sexton led a privileged life, yet she concludes this section with a reference to her father’s alcoholism. The final stanza continues this reflection: Sexton finds her mother’s diary, which elliptically records three years of her father’s drinking. This, like the family pictures in stanza 4, Sexton decides to keep; they are artifacts that she hopes, in the poem’s final three lines, will enable her to come to terms with her own mixed feelings about her father.

Forms and Devices

By using a fairly open line in “All My Pretty Ones,” Sexton achieves a conversational tone in this interior monologue. The rhyme scheme is ababcdcdee, which gives a strict form to the poem, but a form whose meter and structure does not intrude on what could be termed the rhythm of everyday speech. By making individual lines within a stanza fairly long, Sexton adds to the somber tone of this encounter with her dead father, his dead past, and the end of her childhood. This form also makes the lines and stanzas heavy: Sentences continue for several lines, weighing the poem down and adding to the feeling of sadness that Sexton achieves in her description of what may be her first articulation of being an adult orphan. Controlled form plays an important part in Sexton’s early poetry; the more difficult the emotional event, the tighter the form. In “All My Pretty Ones,” she uses the structure to give an external control to a powerful moment.

Of equal importance is the strong visual sense that Sexton imparts to the poem. Much of what she describes relates to seeing: images of her dead parents, artifacts that symbolize aspects of her father’s personality and life, pictures that freeze moments in her ancestors’ lives and in her immediate family’s past. Sexton offers a balanced description of these artifacts, allowing the reader to decide their importance to the woman who is sorting through the remnants of her parents’ lives. It is the choice of things rather than what Sexton says about those things that makes the commentary poignant and powerful. Sexton frequently reports rather than analyzes, as in the case of her mother’s diary in the poem’s final stanza. Much like this older woman’s account of her husband’s alcoholism, “telling all she does not say,” Sexton’s poem shows rather than explains. In this regard, the photographs she sifts through in stanzas 2 through 4 do the same thing for the poet: They offer images, but they fail to explain why they were important ones to the man who kept them for all those years.

The power of “All My Pretty Ones” rests partly in its twofold focus. The poet reflects on her father’s life and tries to make sense of it, as the reader does listening to her “conversation” with her now-dead parent. Also, in sorting out her father’s world, Sexton is also sorting out her feelings for this man, someone who obviously was difficult for her to love unconditionally. The actions of the daughter move from discarding images and things in the first two stanzas to keeping images and artifacts “to love or look at later.” The final stanza concludes this transformation, and the last couplet resolves the tension that Sexton has been building. She offers her dead father forgiveness. This final line repeats an image of enfolding that she used to conclude the previous stanza when she refolded the pictures of her father; in the last line of the poem, Sexton herself bends down over the material scraps that her father has left behind and forgives him.

Bibliography

Furst, Arthur. Anne Sexton: The Last Summer. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000.

Hall, Caroline King Barnard. Anne Sexton. Boston: Twayne, 1989.

McClatchy, J. D. Anne Sexton: The Artist and Her Critics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978.

McGowan, Philip. Anne Sexton and Middle Generation Poetry: The Geography of Grief. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2004.

Middlebrook, Diane Wood. Anne Sexton: A Biography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991.

Sexton, Linda Gray, and Lois Ames, eds. Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977.

Swiontkowski, Gale. Imagining Incest: Sexton, Plath, Rich, and Olds on Life with Daddy. Selinsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press, 2003.

Wagner-Martin, Linda, ed. Critical Essays on Anne Sexton. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1989.