Young

“All My Pretty Ones” by Anne Sexton (1962)

In this poem with a title influenced by Macduff’s mourning line in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the speaker directly addresses her father as she goes through his belongings post-death, influenced by Sexton’s loss of her mother and then her father shortly afterward. The father, who is behind a “half shut” (Line 11) window in “Young,” is again reduced to objects in “All My Pretty Ones,” including “a gold key, [a] half of a woolen mill / twenty suits from Dunne’s, an English Ford” (Lines 5-6). As both poems are part of the same collection, the reader can see the maturity of the speaker from youth to adulthood and how the relationship between a daughter and her father can take many twists and turns.

“Lady Lazarus” by Sylvia Plath (1965)

In this free-verse poem by fellow Confessional poet Sylvia Plath from Ariel, the speaker could easily represent an adult version of the younger speaker in Sexton’s “Young.” The speaker identifies herself as “only thirty” (Line 20) and mentions that she has “nine times to die” (Line 21). The introspective sense of internal self and references to the external body with hints of melancholy in “Lady Lazarus” evoke similar tones and themes as in the Sexton poem, which introduces the speaker as “a lonely kid” (Line 2).