Anne Sexton's The Truth The Dead Know

Anne Sexton’s The Truth the Dead Know conveys the speaker’s overwhelming feelings following the death of her parents within three months of each other. The story begins in June at the Cape, which would normally provide pleasant images of the sea and fresh air, but in the speaker’s grief, the wind is stony, the water is closing in as a gate, and the sunshine is as rain pouring down on her. She is intimately touched by death and realizes that all of mankind suffers this tragedy, even driving some to consider suicide. Yet, in the end, she realizes that her concerns are in vain because not even the dead have a care for how she is feeling; they are just like stones swallowed by the vast ocean. The poem is Sexton’s way of examining her feelings regarding

She is unable to find consolation in her usual happy vacation spot following the death of her parents but perseveres past her previous exclamation to stop acting brave. The Cape in June would normally be a happy, carefree vacation, but when she travels there after her father’s funeral she does not find the normal joy of the gentle wind, the warm sunshine, and the welcoming sea: “We drive to the Cape. I cultivate / myself where the sun gutters from the sky, / where the sea swings in like an iron gate / … In another country people die” (5-8). The speaker uses paradoxical imagery to show her inner contradictions between a place that she feels is usually happy, and her current state filled with sadness. The gutter she describes that is holding onto the sun in the sky represents the warmth being held away from her, especially in this relaxed place. Even the waves approaching the shore are not gentle, and are in fact in her mind like an iron gate keeping her from the closeness of her loved ones. The speaker tries to rationalize her overwhelming feelings of grief, aware that this tragedy happens everywhere and the hardship that results is normal. After examining her surroundings, the speaker addresses death itself exclaiming, “My darling, the wind falls in like stones / from the whitehearted water” (9-10). After being touched by death,

The speaker has endured tragic loss and after realizing the importance to carry on, she finds solace and assurance with the realization that her parents who are now dead do not care about her current actions, and she can carry on with her life knowing that the sorrow she faces will not prevail for much longer after she passes away. The speaker questions what the dead are thinking by rhetorically asking, “And what of the dead? / They lie without shoes / in their stone boats” (13-15). The metaphor about graves being stone boats shows the inability to avoid death because boats made out of stone will always sink, forever unable to rise to the surface. Just like she is swallowed up by her grief, her dead parents are the stones that were swallowed up by the waves, symbolizing death’s certitude. In the end of the poem she finally answers her rhetorical question about what the dead feel and comes to the conclusion that even blessing them is useless, for they cannot hear when she says, “They refuse / to be blessed, throat eye, and knucklebone” (16). They have no voice so they cannot speak, they have no sight so they cannot see, and they have no touch so they cannot feel. Following the