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Analysis Of Her Kind By Anne Sexton

Decent Essays

The poem “Her Kind” by Anne Sexton details a dark walk down memory lane where the speaker of the poem is remembering all the things she has been in the past. What is known about the speaker is that she is a woman and what is learnt through her situation is her path already being determined. The speaker does not remain angered in the matter of her gender but it becomes the basis of her solidarity with everything outside the fold. In the first stanza, the speaker claims herself to be a witch in a possessed form of being it does not matter what she does it is how and when she does it because she is on the move. Sexton is bound to make her readers see how strange her speaker truly is as she explains who truly gets to decide what a woman is. The speaker is drawing back to think of the categories of people and the kinds of women who do not fit in with society’s mold. The last line of the first stanza becomes important as it turns everything around with the declaration of the speaker’s self in “I”. The “I” in the first line is not the same in the last line of stanza one, two, and three. The woman puts a distance between the possessed witch-like woman and herself to affirm that she is one of her kind. The witch woman then becomes a conceit and symbol throughout the rest of the poem for what the speaker is truly experiencing because she uses the word “kind” to express both forms of identification through actual relation and metaphorical. Sexton also uses the matter of imagery

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