Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Anne Sexton's "End, Middle, Beginning" is a haunting and deeply metaphorical exploration of a life marked by rejection, survival, and the ultimately devastating experience of love. Through stark and often surreal imagery, Sexton traces the journey of an "unwanted child" from her traumatic beginnings to her disillusioned end, examining the painful realities of existence, the longing for love, and the inevitable acceptance of fate. The poem’s structure, with its title suggesting a reversed chronology, reflects the disorienting and cyclical nature of the protagonist's experiences.

The poem opens with the image of the "unwanted child," who is "aborted by three modern methods" but "hung on to the womb." This child is tenacious, refusing to be erased despite attempts to "black her out." The language here is stark and clinical, underscoring the violence and rejection the child faces even before birth. The imagery of the child "building her house" into the womb suggests a desperate attempt to create a space for herself in a world that does not want her. The repetition of the phrase "to no avail" emphasizes the futility of these efforts, setting a tone of inevitable tragedy.

At her birth, the child does not cry, even when "spanked indeed," a traditional method to elicit a newborn's first breath. Instead, "snow fell out of her mouth," a chilling image that conveys coldness, silence, and perhaps a sense of emptiness or deathliness from the very start of her life. The unnaturalness of this image suggests that something essential has been lost or was never present—this child is marked by an absence, a void, from the moment of her arrival.

As the child grows, her hair "turned like a rose in a vase, / and bled down her face." This startling metaphor connects beauty with decay, life with death, as the rose, typically a symbol of beauty and love, becomes a source of bleeding, a sign of suffering. The use of "rocks" to "keep / the growing silent" evokes a sense of suppression and control, as those around her attempt to stifle her development, yet these efforts, while bruising, do not succeed in "kill[ing]" her spirit. The phrase "kill was tangled into her beginning" suggests that death and destruction were inherent in her existence from the start, yet she continues to endure.

The poem then shifts to the child’s experience of being "locked...in a football," an image that is both bizarre and poignant. The football, a symbol of rough play and male-dominated sports, becomes a prison for the girl, yet she transforms it into "a warm doll's house," demonstrating her resilience and imagination in the face of confinement. Similarly, when "insects" are "pushed...in to bite her off," she reimagines them as a "puppet show," further highlighting her ability to mentally escape from the brutality inflicted upon her.

As the child grows into adulthood, the world gives her "a ring," a traditional symbol of commitment and love, yet she wears it "like a root," a symbol of something that binds her to the earth, perhaps unwillingly or with a sense of resignation. Her internal reflection, "To be not loved is the human condition," reveals a profound disillusionment and acceptance of lovelessness as a fundamental part of life. This realization leads her to "lay like a statue in her bed," a figure frozen and lifeless, devoid of hope or movement, signifying her emotional paralysis.

The turning point in the poem comes "once, by terrible chance," when "love took her in his big boat." This moment of love is described as a "scalding joy," a paradoxical phrase that conveys both intense pleasure and pain. The woman shovels the ocean, an impossible task that symbolizes the overwhelming and all-consuming nature of love. However, this joy is fleeting, as "love seeped away," and the boat that once carried her turns into "paper," fragile and easily destroyed. This transformation signals the inevitable loss and the collapse of what once seemed solid and real.

In the poem’s final lines, the woman comes to understand her fate, "at last." She recognizes that she must "Turn where you belong," resigning herself to become "a deaf mute," a "metal house"—cold, unfeeling, and impenetrable. The imagery of being drilled "into no one" suggests a final erasure of self, a complete surrender to the void that has haunted her since birth. The poem closes on this bleak note, emphasizing the inexorable progression from an unwanted beginning to a resigned and hollow end.

"End, Middle, Beginning" is a powerful exploration of the human condition, marked by themes of rejection, survival, love, and loss. Sexton’s use of stark and surreal imagery, coupled with the poem’s reversed chronological structure, reflects the disorienting and cyclical nature of the protagonist's life experiences. The poem speaks to the deep pain of feeling unwanted, the fleeting nature of joy, and the ultimate acceptance of a fate shaped by these forces.

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