The Truth the Dead Know (1962). Content and Description

“The Truth the Dead Know” is a poem Sexton wrote in response to the deaths of her parents, which occurred within three months of each other in 1959. It begins starkly, “Gone, I say and walk from the church,” and the theme of rigid, unchangeable death persists throughout the poem. When her loved ones have gone from her, the exhausted narrator leaves the scene, unwilling to follow meaningless funeral traditions.

She rejects the conventional rites that surround the end of life, choosing to walk, rather than take the traditional, formal ride with the interment motorcade. She then escapes to the seashore, where she tries to take refuge in human contact while she numbly reflects on what it means to be dead, as well as what it means to be alive when both parents are gone. In this poem, the narrator recognizes and grapples fiercely with the hardest reality of living, our human mortality.

“The Truth the Dead Know” is part of her second collection of poems, All My Pretty Ones, which, Sexton claimed later, were written to communicate the causes of madness. Two significant deaths within a short time of each other crushed her spirit, threatening her always-fragile mental health. The narrator, despite trying to separate herself physically from the reality of death, finds it waiting for her in her refuge by the sea. She continues to be haunted by her parents’ deaths and the harsh afterlife she envisions for them.

This poem is a good example of Sexton’s ability to write bare narrative lines, such as “I am tired of being brave,” that frankly convey her reaction to months of bearing witness to suffering. The poem shows her powerful use of imagery and controlled rhyme in a structured abab cdcd form. The images she chose for this poem are uniformly hard, reflecting the inflexibility of death, beginning with “the stiff procession” from the church. When she flees to the sea, it is not the soft Cape Cod summer seashore that we might expect, for “the sun gutters in the sky” and “the sea swings in like an iron gate.” Nature reflects her despair.

The wind “falls in like stones,” reinforcing the depths of her grief, but she finds temporary comfort in the human touch, in the realization that “No one’s alone.” The hard images return as Sexton imagines her dead parents as stone bodies in stone boats, shoeless and without need of the formal blessings of the church, which cannot penetrate their rock surroundings anyway. Just as she has refused the “stiff procession” from the church, so they “refuse / to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.” No heavenly afterlife for them; they lie like stone, among stone, as the sea rocks beneath them.

In this four-quatrain poem, the poet once more works to take control of extremely painful events in her life by forcing pattern and meaning on them. Her friend the poet Maxine Kumin recalls that this is one of the poems that Sexton revised repeatedly, working to streamline the language and cleanse it of biographical or sentimental details. Long-vowel rhymes such as cultivate and iron gate, more like stone and knucklebone, emphasize the finality and the unforgiving nature of death.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. “The Truth the Dead Know” appeared in Sexton’s second collection of poems, All My Pretty Ones. Look up the literary allusion of the title phrase, examine its context, and relate it to the content of this poem.

2. Compare this poem with Sylvia Plath’s “Full Fathom Five” (http://www.angelfire.com/tn/ plath/ff5.html) and “All the Dead Dears” (http:// www.angelfire .com/tn/plath/dears .html). How are the ways the two poets envision the dead similar? Note how their styles and images and the tones of their narrators differ. Evaluate the effects of each of the poems on their audiences.

3. Compare the isolated afterlife Sexton foresees for her parents with that she describes for her mentor, the poet John Holmes, in “Somewhere in Africa.”