Elizabeth
“Elizabeth Gone” is a poem by Sexton about the helplessness of watching an old woman die a slow, miserable death. Elizabeth is helpless and the speaker is helpless as well. Although not her actual name, Elizabeth is said to be based on the poet’s great-aunt.
Johnny Pole
“For Johnny Pole on the Forgotten Beach” positions the title character as the speaker’s brother, but the facts are that Sexton did not have a brother. For all her legacy as a confessional poet, it is therefore important to keep in mind that Sexton was also very good at creating fictional characters such as Johnny and how the sister’s memory of him as a ten year old surfing prodigy is juxtaposed with her imagination of the details of how he met his death on a foreign beach as part of an invasion of the war.
Snow White
Snow White is one of the many fairy tale characters reinterpreted by Sexton in her collection Transformations. The poem follows the familiar events of the story for the most part including her time with the Seven Dwarves and her death by poison apple delivered by the disguised evil queen. They key “transformation” of the story occurs in its concluding imagery of a satisfied Snow White—resurrected from death—gazing adoringly into the mirror after arranging for the evil queen to a die a tortuous death by dancing in enchanted shoes of red-hot iron.
Dr. Y
Words for Dr. Y is a posthumously published collection of poems pared with a few stories. Dr. Y as a character himself is a rather nebulous figure who never achieves any sense of identity, but then that is not his point. Most of the poems directly addressed the figure but not always specifically as Dr. Y. The point of the poems is to recreate the experience of a therapy session (although some are dated as to take on a form more akin to a letter) in which a patient discusses with her psychiatric physician the many associations related to her state of mind and being.
Cinderella
Unlike Snow White in which the poet starkly transforms the familiarity of the fairy tale character, Sexton’s Cinderella is a much more sinister work of poetry that relies entirely upon tone, irony and motif to “get” the transformation. The story undergoes no significant change at all: the wicked stepmother, her two evil daughters, the ball, the prince, the lost slipper…it’s all there. Even the ending remains the same as the poet informs the reader that Cinderella and the prince lived happily ever after. So while everything works out exactly the same it is still becomes a fairy tale with a bitter aftertaste resulting from the interjection of ironic commentary by the speaker which introduces a completely different tone to the recurrence of familiar motifs.
Father
The character of the speaker’s father appears in a number of Sexton’s poems. While these poems generally are categorized among her “confessional” verse, it is not always clear that the father is specifically intended to be autobiographical. Many of these poems about the father are the ones which most explicitly deal the recurring theme of incest: “How We Danced,” “Oysters,” and “Santa.” However, the very same sense of an incestuous father also shows up in a relatively straightforward fictional poem such as “Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty)” in her collection Transformations.
