Hello and welcome to the Discourse. ‘Young’ is a poem by Anne Sexton published in 1962 in her second poetry collection All My Pretty Ones. Sexton is associated with the Confessional style of poetry, also attributed to Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath, among others. Prominent themes of her work include her most intimate thoughts regarding extramarital affairs, mental health, suicide, and depression. The poem portrays the turmoil that most people experience during their teenage years. Sexton has used vivid imagery, raw emotions, and a hauntingly beautiful style to explore the innermost thoughts and feelings of a young girl struggling to find her place in the world. The poem's speaker is ‘I,’ a teenage girl who reflects on a past summer night and then it becomes the norm of her life. The poem appears more fictional than factual as the poet added various fairytale elements in the poem. The speaker is not necessarily the poet herself. However, Sexton was criticized for her excessive use of personal narrative.
The poem's main theme is the struggle to find one's identity. The speaker is at a crossroads in her life and is uncertain about who she is and who she wants to be. The poem also touches on the issue of the loss of innocence. The speaker is acutely aware of the changes happening around her, and she struggles to come to terms with them. She is no longer a child, and she is beginning to see the world differently. She is grappling with the harsh realities of life, and she is mourning the loss of her innocence.
Structure of Young:
The poem is a single-stanza free verse poem of 23 lines. The poem is a single, long sentence, with clauses paused by an astute use of commas. The poet used vivid imagery, synecdoche, alliteration, metaphor, personification, assonance, consonance, and enjambment. Twelve out of a total of twenty-three lines are enjambed. It is a reflective poem as a teenager with a dreamy, surreal tone. There is no fixed meter though the poet predominantly used iambs. It is a single sentence 23-line free verse poem with no rhyming scheme though one can find slanting rhymes at the end of the lines.
Summary of Young:
Lines 1-4
“A thousand doors ago
when I was a lonely kid
in a big house with four
garages and it was summer”
The first line of the poem is a synecdoche. ‘A thousand doors ago’ suggests viewing the speaker’s life a long time ago. However, the speaker is not merely indicating the passage of time, rather, she is offering a view of her life through various of her decisions, and situations she faced that created a barrier between her childhood and her adolescence as she is growing old. The door also represents the speaker’s house, where she was supposed to be loved, protected, and taken care of.
The speaker reflects on her childhood, she was a lonely kid in a big house with four garages. It suggests that the speaker lived in an affluent family. Generally, kids remain busy with their school work but it was summer and a summer break is often marked as a time of idle play. The speaker mentions the wealth and extravagance of her home but also expresses her loneliness. The ‘door’ is a metaphor, a thing you open and close, that is locked and unlocked and lets you enter a new space, beyond the threshold.
Lines 5-12
“as long as I could remember,
I lay on the lawn at night,
clover wrinkling under me,
the wise stars bedding over me,
my mother’s window a funnel
of yellow heat running out,
my father’s window, half shut,
an eye where sleepers pass,”
The speaker expresses her loneliness in a daunting manner, suggesting the earth and sky as cosmic powers that are burying her. These lines express the changes she was facing due to puberty, her childlike body was leaving her. She remembers a night when she was lying on the lawn, all alone. Neither her mother, nor father were looking at her, and she felt lonely. Her parents had different rooms where they were. This suggests a strife between her parents. Despite their wealth, her parents were not a happy couple and this is why they had such an arrangement. The girl looks at her mother’s room through a window and describes it as a ‘funnel of yellow heat,’ which suggests that her mother still was a source of love, care, and inspiration for her, though it was dimming away, ‘running out’. Her relationship with her mother is running down a drain. She describes the window of her father’s room rather gloomily, ‘half shut,’ suggesting she was disappointed with her father. The girl is growing and she understands that the relationship between her parents is not harmonious.
‘Lay on the Lawn,’ is an example of alliteration. The sound of ‘o’, and ‘l’ has been repeated suggesting assonance and consonance.
Lines 13-20
“and the boards of the house
were smooth and white as wax
and probably a million leaves
sailed on their strange stalks
as the crickets ticked together
and I, in my brand new body,
which was not a woman’s yet,
told the stars my questions”
In these lines, the speaker expresses her exasperation as she sees her house and the married life of her parents on the verge of meltdown and expresses the ‘boards of the house’ are ‘white as wax’. She vividly remembers that it was autumn as leaves were falling and crickets were singing the songs of nature. To change is the rule of nature and she too was undergoing a change, her body was changing. She was going through the phase of puberty as if she was getting a ‘brand new body’. Despite the changes, she wasn’t mature enough, she was still a teenage girl, not a grown-up woman. She was lonely, exasperated, bewildered, not only because of the changes she was going through but also because there was no one to soothe her. Her own parents were going through marital troubles and were on the verge of a breakup. The child was leaving, and the adult was taking its place. She had so many questions, and stars were there to answer.
It should be noted that the speaker is outside her home. Her child-like body represents her home, which is crumbling, dying, and being buried in between the sky and the earth. It is melting away, she is going through the changes of puberty, and getting a new body or adulthood. This new body is ‘not a woman’s yet.’
Lines 21-23
“and thought God could really see
the heat and the painted light,
elbows, knees, dreams, goodnight.”
Going through the changes, the girl had many questions, and no one to answer but stars. She believed the omnipotent, all-seeing, all-knowing god would answer her questions and soothe her troubled, bewildered soul. The narrator recalls a transitional time of life, on the border between childhood and adulthood. This change is presented in physical, and bodily terms, stressing that she has not yet become biologically mature. Interestingly, there is no looking ahead to what the results of this might be. Since her parents were not careful enough to soothe her and be with her, she believed God, and the cosmic powers, the stars, the sky, and the earth would help her out. She expressed her belief in the past tense, which suggests that she no longer holds that belief. In the last line, the speaker expresses the changes in her body that she is facing, the changes in her psyche, and her dreams, and then she sleeps.
So this is it for today. We will continue to discuss the history of American English literature. Please stay connected with the Discourse. Thanks and Regards!
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