Summary and Analysis of Her Kind: Poem
About The Author
About the Poem
Anne Sexton wrote during the “confessional period” of poetry during the 1950s. This style of poetry was very personal and, as you might surmise, confessional. If you’re familiar with Sylvia Plath’s style of writing, you know the kind. It focused on topics that were at that time controversial, such as depression, mental illness, suicide and thoughts of death, sexuality, and so on. “Her Kind” is one of Sexton’s most famous poems, published in 1960:
Summary and Analysis of the Poem
As you can see, this poem embodies much of the sentiment common throughout confessional poetry: gloominess, the welcoming of death, so on. The diction is strong, vivid, and dark: “haunting,” “evil,” “ribs crack[ed],” “witch,” “black air,” “twelve-fingered,” and the like. Sexton suffered from depression herself, so as we can plainly observe, the poem reflects much of the darkness built up within her own heart. Her illness spurred extreme thoughts of violence that came not quite out of herself but out of the darkness inhabiting her mind. She describes herself as a haunting, “possessed witch,” “dreaming evil;” a “lonely thing” “out of mind.”
Those suffering from depression and extremely low self-esteem often have these types of thoughts about themselves; they imagine themselves as horrific, lonesome monsters, taken over by something they are unable to control, as not entirely human anymore: “a woman like that is not a woman, quite.” During this time period, women were still expected to be delicate and innocent of mind, and as Sexton reflects, her illness permitted her to be neither of these things.
Truly, she did not fit in with the fold, as she reminds us several times; she has made living in “warm caves in the woods,” separate from people, “misunderstood.” She doesn't fit in with what is expected of her as a woman, as we can glean from the line “fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves;” she didn't perform this wifely duty for a man, but rather for the worms in the forest—she is isolated, an outcast not fit to conform to her expected station as the perfect, chipper wife. She seems disassociated with herself, as though she were a ghost watching her body go through motions, not entirely attached to it, using both the first and third person to describe her actions.
In the final stanza, she personifies a witch on her way to be burned alive. Her being different caused life to hunt her down like a witch, persecuting her and sentencing her to death. Sexton’s illness more than likely made her unable to function normally with others and follow accepted social conventions, so she felt that life was out to condemn and torture her. But she’s not ashamed of who she is; she is not “ashamed to die.” This death by the fire most likely refers to her own imagined suicide, and indeed, Sexton would later go on to end her own life. She knows she was born different, and she’s not ashamed of that, nor is she ashamed of choosing to walk to the grave.
With the repeated line “I have been her kind,” she identifies herself with an archetype of woman she believes is not limited only to herself. She is the kin of these ostracized women, these women who don’t quite fit in with what their roles prescribe them to be, these persecuted women who can’t seem to adjust properly to their places in life’s mould. This deep, dark confession embodies the essence of confessional literature: an expression of one’s hidden thoughts, of the darkness that inhabits the writer, rendering them unlike most others in society and unable to fit in as society would have them do.
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