The poet of ignorance

By Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton’s “The poet of ignorance” is a most remarkable confessional poem

revealing her innermost beliefs or rather disbeliefs in her own God. The poem offers a glimpse of

the torment that an agnostic has to undergo in order to have something to believe in, in order to

give a meaning to her life. Anne Sexton’s spiritual anguish is presented in the metaphor of the

huge crab “clutching fast to my heart”. The pain that emerges from her ignorance of God is not

only spiritual, but it also affects her at a physical level as it can be compared to an incurable

disease. There is no treatment to it, although the doctors of Boston have tried all kind of

remedies. She alone can defeat the crab, but the fight seems useless as her attempts only manage

to make the crab stronger: “I have tried prayer/but as I pray the crab grips harder/and the pain

enlarges”.

The first stanza of the poem seems to be made up of merely suppositions about the earth,

the stars, the moon and about God. These suppositions reinforced by the repeated conclusion “I

do not know.” inflict a feeling of unknowingness on the reader and make him wonder about what

we really know about things that are not palpable. The cause of her disease, of her ignorance of

God is therefore the fact that there is not enough empirical evidence to prove her that there is

indeed a God for all of us, not only the God “heard by the deaf”, by the ones that take everything

they are told for granted and do not search for the truth themselves. The very idea of God is

expressed as a paradox here: “Perhaps God is only a deep voice/heard by the deaf.” At this point,

it seems that she totally submits her spiritual life to reason and because of this her heart will be in

pain as we will later learn.

The supposition concerning her own person, with which the second stanza begins, does

not end in the haunting “I do not know.” A verdict is uttered revealing that introspection has

dismissed the uncertainty. However, the verdict is harsh: “Perhaps I am no one./True, I have a

body/and I cannot escape from it.” Her unachievable desire for self-transcendence makes her

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search for meaning futile and destroys her aspirations: “I would like to fly out of my head,/but

that is out of the question.” Despite her lack of faith, she paradoxically adheres to universal

determinism as a justification of her personal failure “It is written on the tablet of destiny/that I

am stuck here in this human form.”

In the third stanza the focus is on the “disease” that is consuming her and the way in

which Anne deals with it. The severe pain caused by the crab clutching fast to her heart lead her

to the doctors, who without being able to find a diagnosis of her heart condition, have tried all

kind of remedies. Nothing worked and the first self imposed medicine that was supposed at least

to alleviate pain was, ironically, to ignore it: “I try to forget it, go about my business”. This

showing no result, her last attempt is prayer, which could be the only remedy now. The side

effects however are too much for her to endure and she abandons this treatment as she realizes

how far she is from God and how difficult a fight it would be for her to change all her life: “as I

pray the crab grips harder/and the pain enlarges.”

In the concluding stanza, her uncertainty returns “perhaps it was a dream” and she has a

revelation about her suffering: “that the crab was my ignorance of God.” However, this

revelation comes now only like a medical report. It seems that she does not want to recover from

it anymore because she cannot give up who she is in order to become one of the “deaf” that hear

the voice of God. The last line “But who am I to believe in dreams?” incorporates the feelings

expressed in the first two stanzas as a return to her own beliefs- that something unverifiable is

unworthy of trust and that she is just an ordinary person as she cannot unleash her spirit form

her body.

Concluding, “The poet of ignorance” can be said to constitute a futile quest for God, a cry

for help from an authoress who seems to be the embodiment of Samuel Beckett’s famous: “I

cannot go on. I must go on. I go on.”

Kotoi Nicoleta-Cristina

2nd year, EN-FR

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