Wanting to Die by Anne Sexton

First published: 1964; collected in Live or Die, 1966

Type of poem: Lyric

The Poem

“Wanting to Die” is a short poem in free verse that divides its thirty-three lines into eleven tercets (three-line stanzas). Because it is written in the first person and is conversational in form, this poem has been described as one of Anne Sexton’s literary suicide notes. Because it presents a speaker attempting to explain to a sympathetic listener why she wants to kill herself, some critics have also suggested that it reads like a discussion between Sexton and her psychiatrist. The use of the first person in a poem often causes readers to assume that the poet’s voice and the speaker’s voice are the same—an assumption that, while often erroneous, holds true for this work. Besides being suicidal herself, Sexton often used letters or personal reminiscences as the foundations for her writing. “Wanting to Die,” in fact, was initially a free-association addendum attached to a letter written to her friend Anne Wilder when Wilder had asked Sexton why she was attracted to suicide. Knowing that Wilder was a psychiatrist and was, therefore, unlikely to overreact to even strong imagery, Sexton addressed Wilder’s very real question in poetic form.

In the opening lines of “Wanting to Die,” Sexton’s speaker chooses to respond honestly to the question posed to her even though the hearer may find the topic repellant. “Since you ask,” she says, she will tell. The speaker describes herself as walking unconsciously through life, unimpressed and unaffected by the world around her. The only passion she feels is “the almost unnameable lust” for death. In the next two tercets, she explains further that she has “nothing against life” and no hatred for “the grass blades” that symbolize the vitality of the living world; she simply loves death’s promise more. “[S]uicides have a special language,” she says, and “like carpenters, they want to know which tools./ They never ask why build.”

So far Sexton’s speaker has simply discussed her life in a detached, calm manner. At this point the speaker tries to explain the attraction that death holds and to translate her concept of death into words that the hearer can understand. The next two tercets describe in brief the speaker’s previous two suicide attempts; she has “possessed the enemy,” death, “taken on his craft,” and “rested.”

The question remains, however: Why does she want to kill herself? The last six tercets seem to provide an answer, however unsatisfactory it may be to others. The first three describe a suicidal person’s perception of life as a kind of “drug.” Although its pleasures are “so sweet,” life keeps the “body at needlepoint”; an addiction to life, like an addiction to drugs, prevents a person from seeing life’s bitter reality. Living an illusion has, the speaker asserts, made her “already [betray] the body” even before she attempted suicide. Further, death has been waiting, “year after year,” to “undo an old wound” and release the speaker from the body that has become a “prison.” Life is a kind of suffering (the “wound”) that only suicides recognize when they are “balanced there” between life and death. Even love, the ultimate reason for living, cannot provide the suicide with sufficient reason to stay alive; love is “an infection” that keeps them sick with life.

Forms and Devices

In writing “Wanting to Die,” Sexton rejected the strict formal patterns that permeate her earlier volumes of poetry. Although they are occasionally present, rhyme and meter in Live or Die are coincidental—the most important poetic devices of the volume are intense, compelling imagery and suggestive metaphor. Many critics have observed the strength behind Sexton’s creative vision; “Wanting to Die,” like most of her other suicide poems, is about a woman driven insane by the intensity of her emotions. Not surprisingly, then, other critics are repulsed by the immediate anguish and intimacy of Sexton’s confessional lines. They suggest that reading Sexton’s poems sometimes seems like a tour through her personal hell. Sexton’s imagery does tend to be repellant. The picture of the happy suicide having “rested, drooling at the mouth-hole” has a strong impact. Yet it is also a true picture of the complete “rest” that death brings. Drooling, lack of eye response, and incontinence (the image created when the speaker says, “the cornea and the leftover urine were gone”) are the realities of dying, however disgusting they may seem.

“Wanting to Die” is also a highly metaphorical poem. For the suicidal speaker, the desire for death is not easily explained to outsiders. The metaphor of the carpenter (with its suggestion of Christ, who himself could be seen as a kind of suicide in that he willingly chose to die) is used to describe why suicides do not seem to consider the impact of their actions before they act. Carpenters do not ask why they build—they presume that the act of building has a purpose. The carpenter’s only concern is which tools to use. Similarly, suicides do not ask why they wish to die; they, too, only need to know which “tools” to use.

For a normal person, death is tragic, even repugnant—the typical reader may not really want to know how the most disgusting qualities of death can be so compelling. Only the careful use of metaphor can overcome repulsion’s barriers by comparing what is visually acceptable and understandable to what is gross and incomprehensible. When the poem compares life to an addictive “drug,” the use of metaphor effectively explains why the suicide does not want to keep on living: He or she wants the power to choose life or death rather than be compelled to live by an addiction to the pleasures of living; “dazzled, they can’t forget a drug so sweet.” “Wanting to Die” may not make this rationale acceptable to normal readers, but its use of metaphor makes the suicidal person’s obsessions more understandable.

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.