The Truth The Dead Know Poem Summary

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Nature of Death In the poem The Truth the Dead Know by Anne Sexton, the author describes her stream of consciousness during the funeral of her parents and her feelings towards death as an inevitable ending. One of the main focuses of this poem is the unlikely pairing of the serene and beautiful setting of “the Cape” and the sadness that comes with a funeral. There is also a reoccurring image of nature that shapes the poem to make it feel livelier which contrasts the death happening in her life. Her choice of description and comparisons show her mixed feelings towards her parent’s death and her internal struggle to get better. Sexton’s description of the funeral begins in the first stanza, which details the narrator’s first thoughts as the…show more content…
Usually, one would associate the month of June to happiness and sunshine. In present time, one could associate it with summer vacation and the liveliness of people being free to go out and enjoy themselves. It is ironic that such a sad description would be placed in a time when people usually have fun and take that time to experience life. The two descriptions are completely opposite but serve to show the narrator’s emotions. It is significant that Sexton decided to put the month because it shows her emotions as it is happening. While the narrator is grieving about the death of her parents, she also needs to take some time to recover from her own struggles. When researching the author, I discovered that her parents had not been as supportive and could even be described as abusive. While this happened in childhood, it affected Sexton all her life and also later suffered from post-partum depression. There could have been an internal struggle with her feelings towards her parents and the depression she had already been feeling. To show this struggle, she emphasizes her need to recover by saying the month of June could be her time to realize it. She also states that she is “tired of being brave” and needs to get better. Her time to do this would be in June so that she could be surrounded by life and have the opportunity to have time for herself without the pathetic fallacy of
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