[lit-ideas] Sexton's "Music Swims Back to Me"

From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "Lit-Ideas " <Lit-Ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 26 Nov 2014 06:37:50 -0800
I have been unfair to Sexton, thinking of poems I didn't like.  There were
many I did like.  Here is one such from her first volume To Bedlam and Part
Way Back.  At the time I read this I was under the impression, as apparently
most readers were, that Sexton learned to write in a mental institution.
According to Kumin that wasn't true.  She was a poet before she got there:

 

Music Swims Back to Me

 

Wait Mister.  Which way is home?

They turned the light out

and the dark is moving in the corner.

There are no sign posts in this room,

four ladies, over eighty,

in diapers every one of them.

La la la, Oh music swims back to me

and I can feel the tune they played

the night they left me

in this private institution on a hill.

 

Imagine it.  A radio playing

and everyone here was crazy.

I like it and danced in a circle.

music pours over the sense

and in a funny way

music sees more than I.

I mean it remembers better;

remembers the first night here.

It was the strangled cold of November;

even the stars were strapped in the sky

and that moon too bright

forking through the bars to stick me

with a singing in the head.

I have forgotten all the rest.

 

They lock me in this chair at eight a.m.

and there are no signs to tell the way,

just the radio beating to itself 

and the song that remembers

more than I.  Oh, la la la,

this music swims back to me.

The night I came I danced a circle

And was not afraid.

Mister?

 

Comment:  After typing it out and thinking about it as I typed I must change
"like" to "sort of like."  Reading it the first time the "Mister?" at the
end emphasizes a bit shockingly her lostness which struck me as very
effective.  But I didn't care for her "la la la."  I suppose that was to
signify her mental breakdown and perhaps she really did sing "la la la" when
she was there but it doesn't seem up to the job.  Maybe there really were
four ladies over 80 in diapers but I don't see how that adds to the poem.
They could as well have been in a hospital as a mental institution.  

 

But what about the change to first person in the last stanza?  She ends the
third stanza with "I have forgotten all the rest" but in the last stanza
begins "they lock me in this chair at eight a.m."  Does this signify that
she is having another episode or that she is remembering the earlier episode
so vividly that she still needs to ask "which way home . . . Mister?"

 

Sort of good but not great IMO.

 

Lawrence



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[lit-ideas] Sexton's "Music Swims Back to Me"

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