What the Dead Know for Sure

 

Anne Sexton's "The Truth the Dead Know" is a poet's exploration of death following the passing of her parents. The poem is the opening work of her third book of poetry, All My Pretty Ones, which was published in 1962. The poem seeks to uncover the secrets of death through an honest and unflinching narrative of Sexton's feelings about life and loss.

“The Truth the Dead Know” is written in first-person, much like a letter of mourning to a friend or a diary entry and is dedicated to her mother and father, who died several months apart in the same year. The level of detail is very personal and Sexton seems to almost bare it all – she does not hold back on her feelings. The poem is composed of four quatrains, with lines of similar length to give the stanzas and the overall poem a compact and organized feeling. Most lines are enjambed but the last line in each stanza is end-stopped, so that each stanza feels like a complete thought. The meter is irregular and the rhyme scheme is abab, cdcd, efef, gege. Most of the end rhymes are exact: grave and brave, sky and die, stone and bone, shoes and refuse. Two of the rhymes are slant rhymed, such as stones and alone, and church and hearse. While the poem rhymes, it is not constricted by those rhymes – the poem is still very much free verse, and unless one stops and takes the time to analyze, one might not notice the rhyming, as it blends in seamlessly. The first letter of each line is only capitalized if it is the beginning the sentence. The first stanza is made up of three sentences; the second, three; the third, three; and the fourth, four. Due to the compactness of the structure and the regularity of the rhyme scheme, the poem is given a very flowing and comforting movement.

From the very beginning, the poem has an unflinchingly honest tone. “The Truth the Dead Know” has a dedication to Sexton's parents at the top, so the reader is immediately thrown into that context before the poem even begins. The first lines convey in setting what the reader began to imagine from the dedication: “Gone, I say and walk from church, / refusing the stiff procession to the grave, / letting the dead ride along in the hearse. / It is June. I am tired of being brave.” Sexton is presumably at one parent's funeral, or perhaps a metaphorical funeral of both, as the weight of two parents gone in such a short time is clearly wearing on Sexton. She is tired of trying to hold it together. Since “it is June,” the reader also knows that it is the death of her father, who died after her mother, which means that this is the second funeral and second loss she has attended in three months. The opening tone conveyed is one of sharp honest and also sharp despair.

Sexton's contemplation of and relation to death continues throughout the poem. It is clear she is lost in misery, though there is a breath of fresh air in the second stanza, a lightening, when she visits the shore. The sea, however, though beautiful, reminds her of faraway lands across the water and that in those places, people are dying, and that people die everywhere (“in another country people die”). It seems that no matter where Sexton goes, no matter what she is looking at, reminders of death are everywhere and her parents are always on her mind. It is also in the second stanza that Sexton begins to talk to someone – she says “we touch,” and continues in the third stanza by directly addressing “my darling.” While there is only a hint of this someone in the second stanza, the third seems to be a reminder that while death may surround, while everything may feel bleak, no one is truly by themselves. As Sexton says, “when we touch we enter touch entirely. No one's alone.” This third stanza shows a contrast between the second and the first, where Sexton walks by herself and feels very hopeless and isolated. Now, she is bringing in a loved one, who reminds her of the humanity of living; as long as one is alive with others, one is not alone. This contrast of death and her deceased parents with her ability to recognize that she is very much alive, however deep in grief, begins to manifest itself. In the last stanza, Sexton turns back to the dead: “They are more like stone than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse / to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.” Here it is clear that Sexton is imagining again the contrast between life and death and struggling to imagine what it would be like to die. It is presumable that by “the dead,” she is speaking of her parents. To her, they could not be touched now, as they are turned to stone. While they cannot be blessed with touch, with the air of living, Sexton seems to be coming to terms with their death and death itself through the writing of the poem. 

What exactly is “the truth” the dead know? Sexton attempts, in this poem, to find it. Perhaps it is that they will never live again and will lay still and somber forevermore; perhaps they are carried in their stone “boats” out to the sea Sexton imagines. Whatever the truth, Sexton works to find some element to latch onto, some meaning in the face of an unspeakable tragedy that the human mind must work to overcome. Death cannot be prevented and is strong as a stone, and Sexton reminds us of this and of the fragility of life through her processing of death.