“The Truth the Dead Know” by Anne Sexton
While attending the University of North Carolina Greensboro, I took Advanced Poetry and one of the things I had to do was annotate some poetry. Here is one of those poems. Enjoy.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42564/the-truth-the-dead-know
Just by looking, we see that Sexton’s poem is an ordinary poem with four quatrains with every other line rhyming. But if you look to the two italicized lines before the poem, there she gives the birth and death dates of her mother and father. In a way this is somewhat cheating (if you read the lines before reading the poem) because it gives away what the poem is going to be about, or it gives us readers that impression. Of course, upon further inspection, it would appear that only the first stanza is referring to those italicized lines. And really, the first stanza only refers to the father, since he died in June. Although, when reading the first stanza, we can tell the poem is about someone’s death since Sexton writes the words “church,” “grave,” and “hearse,” however, the reader would not know whose death it was with the italicized lines and the word “June” in the last line of the first stanza.
Moving onward to the second stanza, we see a shift in subject matter or rather, we are no longer at a funeral and have moved to a different location. For at the start of the stanza the speaker says “We drive to the Cape.” But then after that, the speaker seems to physical leave and move towards an aesthetic location when they say “I cultivate myself when the sun gutters from the sky,” as if they have left earth and gone to heaven, as if they are the dead now. So not only has the speaker shifted in location, shifted from a physical state to an aesthetic state but now the speaker has gone from living to being dead.
In the next stanza, the speaker seems to shift their speech from talking to no one to “My darling.” It is unclear as to whether the speaker is the dead father speaking to the one left behind, in this stanza, or that the speaker is still the one left behind taking on the persona of the one who has died. And from what I understand of this stanza, the speaker is telling “my darling” that they can be together again in heaven and be as they were on earth.
In the final stanza, the speaker seems to go back to being among the living by asking “And what of the dead?” bringing the reader back to earth. Here the speaker might be signifying that the dead or rather dead bodies are nothing more than stone, cold and empty and void of life and somehow no longer human, just as empty shell of what used to be. Although the word “Knucklebone” does tend to throw off the poem as a whole for I’m sure the reader does not know the meaning of the word any more than I do.
