Analysis of two poems by Anne Sexton:
IN THE BEACH HOUSE and THE FARMER’S WIFE
By Dr. Norman Rosenblood.

The BEACH HOUSE is a poem about a speaker’s response to a real or imagined scene of sexual intercourse between two people. The scene is perceived as violent and immoral, and the speaker is forced into a prison-like passivity from which she cannot escape.

However, there is a displacement on to nature of rage and attack (1.9). Some solace is sought in the pillow and feather. A feather has many symbolic meanings: art/creativity and bird/penis being just two possibilities. It is also called a “fellow” suggesting it has masculine qualities.

It is obvious that boundaries are being broken and the perpetrators are heedless to any kind of corrective or preventative action taken by the speaker. The poem ends with their intercourse continuing and the speaker’s failure to stop them. All that the feather/art can do is give voice to their plight; in that sense, poetry fails to rescue, even though it gives form to the trauma. The “little fellow” also fails to stop the “oiling” in the next room. The pillow (11s.24-25) is perhaps a transitional object to which/whom the speaker confides in: it too fails.

It would appear that very little is repressed in the poem: the primal scene is quite conscious. The wish of the speaker is to rework or master the trauma by repeating it in the form of a poem; only this time the speaker is in control of the events and can order them as she pleases.

Upon turning to the THE FARMER’S WIFE, one can see several parallels with BEACH HOUSE as well as consequences from the trauma of the beach house. There is a great deal of rage at the man, in fact he is displaced to the landscape (11.4-5) where there are brooms/phalli all over the place. She cannot escape them and again she is in a passive position forced to be his “habit”. One might ask if she is not subtly attracted to being passively exploited again, as a means of trying to rectify the trauma of the beach house? This wish is unconscious.

In addition, such a view of sexual intercourse is fated to fail: it is coercive, violent and immoral. Yet the prospect of intercourse with its ephemeral but irresistible bliss holds out the promise of escape from the self (“this brief bright bridge”) much like alcohol or any addiction. When the man/sex is a failure at rescuing her (surely an impossible task) then there is rage and death wishes ensue. One of the fates wished on him is to be a poet. Why? Because poetry also fails to rescue one from feeling crippled, lonely and perhaps dead. Furthermore, the speaker unconsciously identifies herself with the farmer’s wife of the nursery tale: “three blind mice see how they run, they all run after the farmers wife/she cuts off their tails with a carving knife.” This castration theme where her lover is linked with “braille” (blinded/castrated) and is the object of her displaced revenge wishes leads to more guilt: hence, the need to punish herself by staying in a painful and unconsciously immoral relationship: “hating the sweat of the house/they keep.” House could also refer to her body which she loathes because it sweats when she is aroused sexually; thus, she is conflicted over her sexuality: it offers respite and merger/identity, but it also engenders shame and violence.

Therefore, I would argue that Sexton’s poems are working, like all complex poems do, on several levels and like dreams they exhibit the characteristics of displacement, condensation, symbol and sometimes archetypal patterns (“three blind mice…carving knife…”). Also, there is an unconscious compulsion to repeat the past no matter how traumatic it may have been. Note how the two poems share similarities and what is more subtly similar are the rhythms of both poems in their last four or five closing lines.

From a submission by N. Rosenblood to The Institute for Psychological Study of the Arts forum, University of Florida, PSYART@LISTS.UFL.EDU. Moderated by the late Norm Holland.

Two Poems by Anne Sexton

IN THE BEACH HOUSE
1   The doors open
2   and the heat undoes itself,
3   everyone undoes himself,
4   everyone walks naked.
5   Two of them walk on the table.
6   They are not afraid of God's displeasure.
7   They will have no truck with the angel
8   who hoots from the fog horn
9   and throws the ocean into the rocks outside.
10  One of them covers the bedstead.
11  One of them winds round the bedpost
12  and both of them beat on the floor.

13  My little cot listens in
14  all night long —
15  even with the ocean turned up high,
16  even with every door boarded up,
17  they are allowed the lifting of the object,
18  the placing themselves upon the swing.
19  Inside my prison of pine and bedspring,
20  over my window sill, under my knob,
21  it is plain that they are at
22  the royal strapping.

23  Have mercy, little pillow,
24  stay mute and uncaring,
25  hear not one word of disaster!
26  Stay close, little sour feather,
27  little fellow full of salt
28  My loves are oiling their bones
29  and then delivering them with unspeakable sounds
30  that carry them this way and that
31  while summer is hurrying its way in and out,
32  over and over,
33  in their room.

THE FARMER’S WIFE
1   From the hodge porridge
2   of their country lust,
3   their local life in Illinois,
4   where all their acres look
5   like a sprouting broom factory,
6   they name just en years now
7   that she has been his habit;
8   as again tonight he'll say
9   honey bunch let's go
10  and she will not say how there
11  must be more to living
12  than this brief bright bridge
13  of the raucous bed or even
14  the slow braille touch of him
15  like a heavy god grown light,
16  that old pantomime of love
17  that she wants although
18  it leaves her still alone,
19  built back again at last,
20  mind's apart from him, living
21  her own self in her own words
22  and hating the sweat of the house
23  they keep when they finally lie
24  each in separate dreams
25  and then how she watches him,
26  still strong in the blowzy bag
27  of his usual sleep while
28  her young years bungle past
29  their same marriage bed
30  and she wishes him cripple, or poet,
31  or even lonely, or sometimes,
32  better, my lover, dead.

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