Ideas presented in “Sylvia’s Death” and “Little Girl, My String Bean, My Lovely Woman"

Anne Sexton can be said to be a poet who used her platform to pass raw messages of passion that directly affected her as compared to the typical writings in which in as much as they relay deep emotions are from the imaginative. Anne's poets, however, are real messages, and not fictitious amusements. Consider for instance ‘Sylvia's Death,' which was a lamentation of the author's longtime friend, Sylvia Plath. In this piece, Sexton sets the tone of her message in her somber mood in which she laments the death of her friend. Though the theme of this piece is death and effectively takes a sad tone, Sexton's approach to the topic is not particularly a bitter one. She does not show any bitterness but expresses her amusement at the manner in which death stroke her friend. Having battled illness before, the author believed that she and her friend had outworn; therefore, she expresses amusement to the fact that her friend succumbed. This presents her friend, Plath, as a selfless person through her going into death selflessly alone even after they had hatched a plan to die together. She allows her friend to tend to her potatoes and bees. 

In her other poem, ‘Little Girl, My String bean, My Lovely Woman,' Sexton speaks to her adolescent daughter about the wonders of the female body in its molding into maturity. The theme of this work is the approach into womanhood; it could be considered a feministic work in which the author urges her daughter to explore her body to the full potential and embrace the changes she is undergoing gracefully. Sexton works to prove to her daughter the power the body has through the use of parallel body and earth imagery. However, her daughter distances herself from this notion through the contrasting image of the string bean. As such, the author uses the distance to highlight the entanglement of the two while expounding on the journey of self-discovery.