This back and forth is the constant parting of the waves and the shore and the rhythm of the ocean and of life, the ebb and flow of existence. In fact in the last stanza the poet tells us in the girl's voice, "I am a shore rocking you off." (Sexton 25)This sense of parting is familiar to us all in some way or another. Here on the surface of the poem it is represented by a mother giving birth to and then giving up a child, but in a more symbolic sense it is the act of creation and the parting with that creation, in particular perhaps the creation of a poem. The author finely crafts and cares for a poem and then has no choice but to release it to the world and that same sense of loss is what Sexton is trying to convey here as well. "You break from me. I choose / your only way, my small inheritor / and hand you off, trembling the selves we lose. / Go child, who is my sin and nothing more.." (Sexton 25) Sexton would most assuredly feel as if her poetry may be her sin exposed to the world and most certainly expressed in the phrase, "the selves we loose."
This poem has a link of understanding to one by another...
In a way it helps to explain the enigmatic last line all the more clearly:
My life closed twice before its close;
It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil third event to me,
So huge, so hopeless to conceive,
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.
This is the ebb and flow, the heaven and hell that life is composed of. The choices that we make, or have no choice over, are all a part of this parting. In this poem there is more than an unwed mother parting with her child, it is the fact that all we can know of life is what we have and what we have lost. Sexton, the poet-mother of this poem expresses it in the metaphor of birth and adoption as exquisitely as any existentialist.
Works Cited
Dickenson, Emily. Selected Poems and Letters of Emily Dickenson. Linscott, Roberts Ed.(1959)
New York: Doubleday.
Sexton, Anne. The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton. Boston: Houghton Mifflin (1981).
