Alyssa Ermino

Confessional Movement

Title: Wanting to Die

Author: Anne Sexton
Literary Genre: Confessional Poetry

The author, Anne Sexton, is known as a confessional poets. She expresses her sorrows,
mental sickness, and yearning for death through writing poetry.The poem ‘’Wanting to Die’’ published
in Sexton’s third collection of poems, Live or Die, demonstrates her obsession with death. It is also her
literary suicide note as Sylvia Plath wrote Edge, few days before her death.

In this poem, she discusses the reasons to commit suicide and her interest for it with a
person who has asked her about it. The poem begins as a kind of dialogue between poet and the
unknown questioner. Autobiographical overtones are also evident here. Her childhood was full of
sufferings. She was attached to her maiden great-aunt.

The author is forced to use a metaphorical language, an analogy with something ordinary
that the hearer will understand.

In the lines “still-born, they don’t always die, / but dazzled, they can’t forget a drug so
sweet”, the author describes how failed suicide attempts can affect the mind by explaining how it tends
to leave the victim fascinated in awe after one’s close encounter with death.

A suicidal person’s first confrontation with death can be closely paralleled with one’s first
encounter with a highly addictive drug. Most commonly, this sort of encounter leads one into a sort of
curious state of mind. Like a suicidal person, it leaves them in a position where the idea of relapse in
both cases can occur. Sexton then follows up with the line, “that even children would look on and
smile” as a means of symbolically labeling the encounter with this “drug” as an innocent one.

The innocence that is described in this context is a very contrasting sort of comparison,
which supports the morose tone of this poem even further. It leaves the reader thinking that the new
suicidal thinker, like the first time drug user, is like an innocent victimized child—unknowing but open to
possibilities.

However, suicides have a special language and the people having suicidal tendencies are
unable to fully comprehend its essence.

Our day to day language has not that much capacity to express the desire of suicide fully.
Hence, the author uses various analogies and metaphors suggesting that the discourse of suicide cannot
be articulated in ordinary language. She alludes to the construction process by using a carpenter's
analogy. To attempt suicide is actually an attempt towards self-construction and self-discovery.

The poem ends at the images which are very shocking and tricky. Life is a negative in the
context of Sexton’s poetry. She’s trying to explain the experiencing of consistent suicidal thoughts and
how they tint one’s experience, but there do not seem to be quite adequate words to do so. She speaks
of the “page of a book carelessly open” and of “the phone off the hook.” These are examples of things
stopping right in the middle of an action, perhaps as one might stop one’s own life by symbolically
taking the phone off the hook. The final image is that of an infection. Death is something that has come
to save one from life. It is the “love” that gets rid of the concerns of life.