"All My Pretty Ones" by Anne Sexton

All My Pretty Ones

By Anne Sexton 

Father, this year’s jinx rides us apart

where you followed our mother to her cold slumber

a second shock boiling its stone to your heart,

leaving me here to shuffle and disencumber

you from the residence you could not afford:

a gold key, your half of a woolen mill,

twenty suits from Dunne’s, an English Ford,

the love and legal verbiage of another will,

boxes of pictures of people I do not know.

I touch their cardboard faces. They must go.

But the eyes, as thick as wood in this album,

hold me. I stop here, where a small boy

waits in a ruffled dress for someone to come ...

for this soldier who holds his bugle like a toy

or for this velvet lady who cannot smile.

Is this your father’s father, this commodore

in a mailman suit? My father, time meanwhile

has made it unimportant who you are looking for.

I’ll never know what these faces are all about.

I lock them into their book and throw them out.

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.

These are the snapshots of marriage, stopped in places.

Side by side at the rail toward Nassau now;

here, with the winner’s cup at the speedboat races,

here, in tails at the Cotillion, you take a bow,

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;

and here, standing like a duke among groups of men.

Now I fold you down, my drunkard, my navigator,

my first lost keeper, to love or look at later.

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.

            As soon as I finished reading the last line of the poem, I let out a sound full of awe and wonder. The poem “All My Pretty Ones” by Anne Sexton is introspective and greatly emotional. The poem centers on Sexton’s feelings and thoughts toward her father’s death. What struck me the most in this poem was Sexton’s statement, “I outlive you, / bend down my strange face to yours and forgive you” (Line 57). In the beginning, Sexton depicts her feelings toward her father as indifferent and harsh. For instance, she indifferently states that her father’s valuable belongings “must go” and she will have to “throw them out” (Line 21). To others, it might seem insensitive for Sexton to do such things after her father died. However, I believe that Sexton acts in this manner because this is the only way she can express her love for her father. Her father in the poem is revealed in a negative light since he had an “alcoholic tendency” and attempted “to marry that pretty widow in a one-month rush” (Line 36). Furthermore, we can infer from his tendencies that he had an unstable life full of alcohol abuse and womanizing tendencies. Obviously, Sexton was negatively affected by her father’s misbehaviors but she chooses to not be spiteful and vengeful. Many people view an individual who indulges in bad habits as a one-dimensional person undeserving of morality and forgiveness. In other words, many believe that those people are immoral and malevolent. However, these individuals are actually three-dimensional individuals since there is always a reason behind their actions. Maybe Sexton’s dad indulged in these activities because he struggled with his identity or because of his wife’s death. Nevertheless, Sexton illustrates her understanding that her father was three dimensional by calling him “my drunkard, my navigator” (Line 47). This quote connotes a negative and positive meaning reaffirming the idea that her father was three-dimensional. The word “drunkard” depicts him negatively since it can be inferred that he was often drunk around his daughter. Yet the addition of “navigator” depicts him positively since he served as the guide and compass to her life. Thus, Sexton possesses mixed feelings toward her father because he constantly shifted from being a good father to a bad father. As a result, Sexton is confused about how she should feel towards her father’s death since he caused such pain and happiness. She therefore chooses to act in an indifferent manner to reveal her cautious love for her father. Sexton portrays her love by forgiving her father sins and deciding to let go of her anger and sadness. She is not ready to love her father at that time but she takes a step of forgiveness to become closer to that stage of appreciation and reminiscence. Also, she believes that time will heal her pains so she puts his belongings on the shelf to remember him as her one and only father. As Peter Ustinov once said, “Love is an act of endless forgiveness.”