Two Poems

Two Poems

The personas depicted within Anne Sexton's "Consorting with Angels" and Sylvia Plath's "Lady Lazarus" demonstrate an open defiance of the subservient female role in favor of a powerful mythological identity. Each work chooses to use and extended metaphor to bring about a change in the perspective of the feminine role. The two works are interested in redefining the mythological identities to incorporate the female sex; however, each work attacks the process differently. Sexton's "Consorting with Angels" first lines begins the persona's experience with an admission of her dissatisfaction with her former role: "I was tired of being a woman/ tired of the spoons and the pots/ tired of my mouth and my breasts/ tired of the cosmetics and the silks" (lines 1-3). Throughout the developement of the poem, the persona choses to deny the former sex of her self until she arrives sexless. The death of the self is remarkably similar to the ongoing death cycle that the persona in Plath's "Lady Lazarus" is accustomed to. Plath's persona provokes a slightly more sympathetic response in her admission because she presents herself as a victim from the holocaust in World War II. "My right foot/ A paperweight,/ My face a featureless, fine/ Jew linen" in the early lines of the poem already indicates a sort of objectification. The persona that Plath has created her persona to move several phases because "dying is an art" while the existence of the persona that ! Sexton has created is more interested in "the answer" to the gender of things. That the death of the self occurs in "Consorting with Angels" is a considerable focus; however, it functions with an air of positiveness that is not present within "Lady Lazarus"

Similar Essays