With Mercy for the Greedy

For my friend, Ruth, who urges me to make an appointment for the Sacrament of Confession

Concerning your letter in which you ask   
me to call a priest and in which you ask   
me to wear The Cross that you enclose;   
your own cross,
your dog-bitten cross,
no larger than a thumb,
small and wooden, no thorns, this rose—

I pray to its shadow,
that gray place
where it lies on your letter ... deep, deep.
I detest my sins and I try to believe
in The Cross. I touch its tender hips, its dark jawed face,   
its solid neck, its brown sleep.

True. There isa beautiful Jesus.
He is frozen to his bones like a chunk of beef.
How desperately he wanted to pull his arms in!
How desperately I touch his vertical and horizontal axes!   
But I can’t. Need is not quite belief.

All morning long   
I have worn
your cross, hung with package string around my throat.   
It tapped me lightly as a child’s heart might,
tapping secondhand, softly waiting to be born.   
Ruth, I cherish the letter you wrote.

My friend, my friend, I was born   
doing reference work in sin, and born   
confessing it. This is what poems are:   
with mercy
for the greedy,
they are the tongue’s wrangle,
the world's pottage, the rat's star.
 

Anne Sexton, “With Mercy for the Greedy” from The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981). Copyright © 1981 by Linda Gray Sexton and Loring Conant, Jr. Reprinted with the permission of Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc.

To me, this poem is the ars poetica of confessional poetry. It was written in the brief span of time after Anne Sexton’s illegal abortion. Although Anne feared the child might not be her husband’s, she also feared the demands that another child would make on her writing life. We still find it easier to talk about abortions in terms of paternity rather than female personhood.

Loss was Anne’s muse, and with this abortion she discovered a new form of loss to write, a loss more damning for the silence that surrounded it. She started keeping a journal, inspired by Dostoevsky’s line: what filthy things the heart is capable of. Although she was close to WD Snodgrass at the time, it’s interesting that Anne didn’t share this news with him or any other male poets. Instead, she confided the abortion in a letter to her Catholic friend, Ruth Soter. In response, Ruth mailed a tooth-marked wooden cross and an encouragement to seek spiritual counsel.

“With Mercy For the Greedy” came from this exchange. I’ve always suspected the title has to do with the mercy Anne sought in her choice of writing over new motherhood—the “greed” and hunger to write for which this world does not forgive us. The poem itself presents two alternate forms of mercy: one found in religion, the other found in writing poetry. Both forms of mercy rely on the act of confession.

My friend, my friend, I was born   
doing reference work in sin, and born   
confessing it. This is what poems are:   
with mercy
for the greedy,
they are the tongue’s wrangle,
the world's pottage, the rat's star.

I don’t think it’s an accident that the last stanza burns itself to the surface of our minds. I don’t think it’s strange that abortion is fugue which structures the piece. I don’t think it’s ironic that confession alienates female poets from gendered femininity that privileges the act of mothering over the tempest of writing. This is what poems are: an admission, a savaging, an out.

*The last line is also an allusion to Anne’s favorite palindrome: “rats live on no evil star.”