Young (1962). Content and Description

“Young,” published in All My Pretty Ones, views a nostalgic youthful memory through a lens of adult cynicism. The poem takes the shape of one long sensuous sentence, recollecting the child’s “brand new body / which was not a woman’s yet” lying on the grass looking up at the summer night sky, “a thousand doors ago.” Doors represent choices and changes; for the narrator, not just time, but opportunities have passed since she was an innocent child looking up into the night sky.

In her privileged childhood summer existence on Squirrel Island, where she did indeed live in a “big house with four / garages,” young Anne Sexton must have experienced many such nights. As the narrator lies on the grass by herself, throwing questions up at the stars, Mother and Father have a background presence; they are remote and separate, not only from the lonely narrator, but also from each other.

Mother is represented by her window: “a funnel / of yellow heat running out.” Her father’s window is “half-shut / an eye where sleepers pass.” The images associated with the parents reflect Sexton’s memory of her mother’s cold materialism and her father’s alcoholism, both of which caused her to feel isolated.

Throughout the poem Sexton’s lines are short and filled with idyllic summer images such as clover wrinkling and crickets ticking. The theme of this poem is innocence, but the innocence is unexpectedly mocked near the end of the poem-sentence. The narrative voice of the poem establishes a mood of carefree childish summer happiness that is challenged by her choice of words near the end: “thought God could really see.”

The adult narrator has suddenly intruded, reflecting that she once was young enough to trust that “God could really see / the heat and the painted light.” Though the child had faith, the adult, looking back, knows that neither parents nor God was really able to see her. The distance between the child and the parents and between the child and the heavens reinforces the atmosphere of loneliness, for God turns out to be no more present than the parents. After that revelation, the narrator becomes the child again and finishes with her only rhyming line: “elbows, knees, dreams, goodnight.”

For Discussion or Writing:
1. Examine the images in “Young.” How do they set the mood for the poem? Why is establishing such a mood important in order for the ending of the poem to be effective?

2. Contrast this poem with “Old,” also published in her book All My Pretty Ones, the collection of poems that Sexton later said were written to explain the causes of her madness.

3. Confessional poets seem to want their audiences to see the persona of the poem and writer as one and the same. Do you think the use of biographical details is limiting to the appeal of the poem, or do they enhance its impact?