Bestiary U.S.A.

Step off, poets, no one beats Anne Sexton in the art of the metaphor.

When I introduce this poetic device to a classroom of novice writers I usually arrive armed with copies of her “Bestiary U.S.A.,” which is accessible and playful and full of surprising comparisons. Sexton’s approach to metaphor is to connect two concrete images together. The bat, for example, is “like a misshapen udder”; the antlers of a moose “like seaweed”; and the lobster is “a shoe with legs.” Other creatures in this eccentric parade include a hornet, a cockroach, a whale and a horse.
When students first encounter these metaphors, they’re stunned by the simplicity of the language, and with a little prodding rethink their own efforts at comparison, which usually contain abstractions: “I was as sad as spilled milk” or “My disappointment felt like a broken room.” They tend to aim for size (as in big things or a big emotional state), as if that translates into greater depth or meaning. Sexton keeps it at eye-level and from this manageable and tangible imagery something larger radiates.
Take the first half of the poem “Porcupine,” for example, which grows and intensifies, metaphor by metaphor, toward a state of distress, without once using the word:
Spine hog,
how do you grow?
Little steel wings
that stick into me.
Knitting needles
that stick into me.
Long steel bullets
that stick into me,
so like the four-inch
screws that hold me
in place, an iron
maiden the doctors
devised.
The repetition of the phrase “stick into me” adds to the sense of anguish of course because it suggests multiple stabbings, or torture, hence the build up to the “iron maiden.”
The lessons: Sexton’s use of metaphor is not just window dressing, and these animals are not simply curiously described creatures, but representations of humanity, or rather, explorations of the bestial nature in humans. But don’t take my word for it. Sexton herself prefaces the Bestiary section with the statement: “I look at the strangeness in them and the naturalness they cannot help, in order to find some virtue in the beast in me.”
This bestiary is included in the second section of 45 Mercy Street, first published in 1976, two years after Sexton’s suicide. It was one of two manuscripts that were published posthumously. The other, Words for Dr. Y, was printed in 1978. But you can find all her work in The Complete Poems published by Houghton Mifflin in 1981.
Sexton is a poet I return to repeatedly, ever since a college dorm roommate (who was taking a poetry class) showed me the poem “Unknown Girl in the Maternity Ward” and pointed out these lines that describe the speaker holding a newborn:
You tip like a cup; your head
moving to my touch.
“Is the kid dead?” my roommate asked me. ¡Joder!