The Ballad Of The Lonely Masturbator By: Anne Sexton

Poets Biography Anne Gray Harvey was born in Newton, Massachusetts, in 1928. She attended Garland Junior College for one year and married Alfred Muller Sexton II at age nineteen. She enrolled in a modeling course at the Hart Agency and lived in San Francisco and Baltimore. In 1953 she gave birth to a daughter. In 1954 she was diagnosed with postpartum depression, suffered her first mental breakdown, and was admitted to Westwood Lodge, a neuropsychiatric hospital she would repeatedly return to for help. In 1955, following the birth of her second daughter, Sexton suffered another breakdown and was hospitalized again; her children were sent to live with her husband's parents. That same year, on her birthday, she attempted suicide.

She was encouraged by her doctor to pursue an interest in writing poetry she had developed in high school, and in the fall of 1957 she enrolled in a poetry workshop at the Boston Center for Adult Education. In her introduction to Anne Sexton's Complete Poems, the poet Maxine Kumin, who was enrolled with Sexton in the 1957 workshop and became her close friend, describes her belief that it was the writing of poetry that gave Sexton something to work towards and develop and thus enabled her to endure life for as long as she did. In 1974 at the age of 46, despite a successful writing career--she won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967 for Live or Die--she lost her battle with mental illness and committed suicide.

The Ballad Of The Lonely Masturbator Anne Sexton

The end of the affair is always death. She's my workshop. Slippery eye, out of the tribe of myself my breath finds you gone. I horrify those who stand by. I am fed. At night, alone, I marry the bed. Finger to finger, now she's mine. She's not too far. She's my encounter. I beat her like a bell. I recline in the bower where you used to mount her. You borrowed me on the flowered spread. At night, alone, I marry the bed. Take for instance this night, my love, that every single couple puts together with a joint overturning, beneath, above, the abundant two on sponge and feather, kneeling and pushing, head to head. At night, alone, I marry the bed. I break out of my body this way, an annoying miracle. Could I put the dream market on display? I am spread out. I crucify. My little plum is what you said.

At night, alone, I marry the bed. Then my black-eyed rival came. The lady of water, rising on the beach, a piano at her fingertips, shame on her lips and a flute's speech. And I was the knock-kneed broom instead. At night, alone, I marry the bed. She took you the way a women takes a bargain dress off the rack and I broke the way a stone breaks. I give back your books and fishing tack. Today's paper says that you are wed. At night, alone, I marry the bed. The boys and girls are one tonight. They unbutton blouses. They unzip flies. They take off shoes. They turn off the light. The glimmering creatures are full of lies. They are eating each other. They are overfed. At night, alone, I marry the bed.

Poets Interpretation In the first stanza, the poet was describing the feeling of the persona. She is a married woman whose husband is eventually leaving her. Here, the persona is not used to the idea that her husband isnt fond of her anymore. She is not really in love with her husband, but she was worried of what the people around them might say if they found out. Readers might think that there is someone else in the second stanza, but the poet used second person to represent also the woman in the poem. Here, she talks about how she pleasures herself alone now that her husband left her. Envy was observed in the third stanza. By stating the other couple and what are the things that they do to each other when they have sex. The persona was comparing her to them, the way they make love to each other and how she gets the pleasure by herself. The persona in the fourth stanza is annoyed by the reality that shes now alone and theres nothing she can do about it. She cannot bring her husband back and all she has is nothing but herself. And that no one will make love to her, but herself. The fifth stanza reveals that her husband, now, has a new woman of his life. It is the reason he left her. She is describing the woman like one of those pretty girls who are raised to be perfect ballet lessons, piano lessons, table manners that type of a woman. At the latter part of the stanza, she describes her as the beaten one. It is seen that maybe, when he left her, she tried to make him stay. But instead, he beat her by including And I was the knock-kneed broom instead. The persona describes how the woman took her husband away from her in the sixth stanza. It was easy for the woman to take the husband maybe because he already fell out of love before he was gone. She also describes how broken she was alone, without him. And now that her husband is married to the other woman, shes left with nothing but her own self. Here in the last stanza, bitterness is observed in her words by the way she concluded that other couples are just lying to each other. They make love to each other in different ways, but there she is, alone in her bed.

Analysis The poem shows a typical couple that is bounded by love but wrecked by another woman. The persona in the poem shows grief, bitterness, envy, jealousy, and broken heartedness to his husband and other woman. It is observed that she keeps on saying at night alone, I marry the bed, for me, it is her representation that no matter what happens to other couple, his husband and his woman, shes still left there, alone with no one to pleasure her but her own self.