Angels Of The Love Affair
Read "Angels Of The Love Affair" by Anne Sexton, a confessional sequence examining marriage and domestic life through a series of symbolic angels, exploring intimacy, motherhood, sexuality, disappointment, memory, emotional conflict, and the complicated realities of love.
Angels Of The Love Affair by Anne Sexton
"Angels of the love affair, do you know that other,
the dark one, that other me?"
1. ANGEL OF FIRE AND GENITALS
Angel of fire and genitals, do you know slime,
that green mama who first forced me to sing,
who put me first in the latrine, that pantomime
of brown where I was beggar and she was king?
I said, "The devil is down that festering hole."
Then he bit me in the buttocks and took over my soul.
Fire woman, you of the ancient flame, you
of the Bunsen burner, you of the candle,
you of the blast furnace, you of the barbecue,
you of the fierce solar energy, Mademoiselle,
take some ice, take come snow, take a month of rain
and you would gutter in the dark, cracking up your brain.
Mother of fire, let me stand at your devouring gate
as the sun dies in your arms and you loosen it's terrible weight.
2. ANGEL OF CLEAN SHEETS
Angel of clean sheets, do you know bedbugs?
Once in the madhouse they came like specks of cinnamon
as I lay in a choral cave of drugs,
as old as a dog, as quiet as a skeleton.
Little bits of dried blood. One hundred marks
upon the sheet. One hundred kisses in the dark.
White sheets smelling of soap and Clorox
have nothing to do with this night of soil,
nothing to do with barred windows and multiple locks
and all the webbing in the bed, the ultimate recoil.
I have slept in silk and in red and in black.
I have slept on sand and, on fall night, a haystack.
I have known a crib. I have known the tuck-in of a child
but inside my hair waits the night I was defiled.
3. ANGEL OF FLIGHT AND SLEIGH BELLS
Angel of flight and sleigh bells, do you know paralysis,
that ether house where your arms and legs are cement?
You are as still as a yardstick. You have a doll's kiss.
The brain whirls in a fit. The brain is not evident.
I have gone to that same place without a germ or a stroke.
A little solo act--that lady with the brain that broke.
In this fashion I have become a tree.
I have become a vase you can pick up or drop at will,
inanimate at last. What unusual luck! My body
passively resisting. Part of the leftovers. Part of the kill.
Angels of flight, you soarer, you flapper, you floater,
you gull that grows out of my back in the drreams I prefer,
stay near. But give me the totem. Give me the shut eye
where I stand in stone shoes as the world's bicycle goes by.
4. ANGEL OF HOPE AND CALENDARS
Angel of hope and calendars, do you know despair?
That hole I crawl into with a box of Kleenex,
that hole where the fire woman is tied to her chair,
that hole where leather men are wringing their necks,
where the sea has turned into a pond of urine.
There is no place to wash and no marine beings to stir in.
In this hole your mother is crying out each day.
Your father is eating cake and digging her grave.
In this hole your baby is strangling. Your mouth is clay.
Your eyes are made of glass. They break. You are not brave.
You are alone like a dog in a kennel. Your hands
break out in boils. Your arms are cut and bound by bands
of wire. Your voice is out there. Your voice is strange.
There are no prayers here. Here there is no change.
5. ANGEL OF BLIZZARDS AND BLACKOUTS
Angle of blizzards and blackouts, do you know raspberries,
those rubies that sat in the gree of my grandfather's garden?
You of the snow tires, you of the sugary wings, you freeze
me out. Leet me crawl through the patch. Let me be ten.
Let me pick those sweet kisses, thief that I was,
as the sea on my left slapped its applause.
Only my grandfather was allowed there. Or the maid
who came with a scullery pan to pick for breakfast.
She of the rols that floated in the air, she of the inlaid
woodwork all greasy with lemon, she of the feather and dust,
not I. Nonetheless I came sneaking across the salt lawn
in bare feet and jumping-jack pajamas in the spongy dawn.
Oh Angel of the blizzard and blackout, Madam white face,
take me back to that red mouth, that July 21st place.
6. ANGEL OF BEACH HOUSES AND PICNICS
Angel of beach houses and picnics, do you know solitaire?
Fifty-two reds and blacks and only myslef to blame.
My blood buzzes like a hornet's nest. I sit in a kitchen chair
at a table set for one. The silverware is the same
and the glass and the sugar bowl. I hear my lungs fill and expel
as in an operation. But I have no one left to tell.
Once I was a couple. I was my own king and queen
with cheese and bread and rosé on the rocks of Rockport.
Once I sunbathed in the buff, all brown and lean,
watching the toy sloops go by, holding court
for busloads of tourists. Once I called breakfast the sexiest
meal of the day. Once I invited arrest
at the peace march in Washington. Once I was young and bold
and left hundreds of unmatched people out in the cold.
Angels Of The Love Affair Summary and Analysis
Anne Sexton stages the poem as a kind of spiritual inventory, addressing a sequence of "angels" that feel less like heavenly beings than altered versions of her own life. Each section opens with a brightly named angel and then plunges into a bodily, painful memory or state: fire and sexuality, filth and illness, paralysis, despair, childhood theft, loneliness. The poem's central movement is from invocation to confession, as if the speaker were trying to map the whole emotional terrain of a life by naming its opposite forces.
The voice is urgent, ironic, and fiercely self-exposing. The speaker keeps testing the distance between idealized purity and the messy realities of the body and mind, and the poem never settles for a simple division between them. Angels of innocence, order, and hope are repeatedly confronted by images of infection, breakdown, and shame. At the same time, the repetitions and extravagant metaphors make suffering into art, so the poem holds two tensions at once: it is both a cry of pain and a highly controlled performance of that pain.
Tone in Angels Of The Love Affair
Sexton's tone is bold, confessional, and often sardonic, as if she is speaking with fierce honesty to forces that cannot answer back. The emotional atmosphere, however, is far more unsettled: the poem feels claustrophobic, feverish, and haunted by pain, even when it briefly opens onto memory or wit. That tension between hard-edged control and emotional exposure gives the poem its unsettling force.
This literary analysis was generated with AI and may contain interpretive differences. Provide your analysis in the comments section.
Themes in Angels Of The Love Affair
- Confession and self-revelation - The poem repeatedly turns private experience into public speech, using direct address to expose memories that are intimate, humiliating, and emotionally raw.
- Body as a site of suffering - Sexton ties mental distress to physical imagery such as disease, paralysis, blood, and appetite, suggesting that inner anguish is lived through the body.
- Innocence versus corruption - Clean sheets, calendars, flight, and hope are set against slime, bedbugs, despair, and blackout, creating a relentless contrast between purity and contamination.
- Fragmentation of identity - The speaker presents herself as divided into multiple states and selves, implying that the self is unstable and made up of conflicting versions.
- Memory and childhood longing - Childhood scenes, especially the raspberry memory, appear as brief moments of desire and exclusion, colored by nostalgia but also by theft and loss.
- Loneliness and isolation - Several sections end in solitude, emphasizing emotional abandonment and the sense that the speaker is cut off from comfort, community, or rescue.
- Despair and survival - Even when the poem dwells on hopelessness, its very act of naming and shaping that darkness suggests an attempt to endure it through language.
Literary Devices in Angels Of The Love Affair
- Apostrophe - The speaker repeatedly addresses abstract angels as if they were present listeners, turning the poem into a dramatic confrontation with inner states.
- Extended metaphor - Each angel becomes a metaphorical figure for a human condition or emotional realm, allowing the poem to build a layered system of meaning across its sections.
- Cataloging - Sexton piles up objects, sensations, and images in long sequences, which intensifies the emotional pressure and mirrors the speaker's overwhelmed mind.
- Hyperbole - Exaggerated phrases and catastrophic images make suffering feel enormous, reflecting both the extremity of the feelings and the dramatic style of the poem.
- Imagery - The poem relies on vivid sensory detail, from soot and soap to snow, raspberries, and bedbugs, to make psychological states feel concrete.
- Repetition - The repeated opening pattern gives the poem ritual force and reinforces the sense of obsessive return to trauma and memory.
- Juxtaposition - Pleasant or innocent images are repeatedly placed beside distressing ones, sharpening the poem's emotional tension and instability.
- Irony - The lofty word "angel" is paired with grotesque or painful realities, creating a bitter contrast between spiritual language and lived experience.
Symbolism in Angels Of The Love Affair
- Angels - These figures seem to symbolize separate emotional or psychic forces, as if each part of life has its own guardian or tormentor.
- Clean sheets - White bedding suggests purity, order, and domestic safety, but it is undermined by memories of illness, violation, and contamination.
- Fire - Fire evokes desire, fury, vitality, and destruction at once, making it a symbol of intense but dangerous life energy.
- Bedbugs - The infestation stands for invasive suffering and the impossibility of keeping the body or mind entirely clean.
- Paralysis - Physical immobility becomes a symbol of emotional and psychological helplessness, a state where agency has disappeared.
- Raspberries - The berries represent a brief, vivid childhood pleasure, yet they are bound up with exclusion and secrecy.
- Calendars - Calendars suggest hope, order, and the passing of time, but in the poem they cannot rescue the speaker from despair.
- Solitaire cards - The solitary game symbolizes isolation and the speaker's reduced world, where life becomes a one-person contest with no companion.
Historical Context of Angels Of The Love Affair
Anne Sexton is strongly associated with confessional poetry, a mid-twentieth-century movement in American verse that brought private experiences such as mental illness, family conflict, sexuality, and trauma into direct poetic speech. Her work often blurs the line between personal testimony and stylized performance, using vivid, theatrical language to confront subjects that earlier poetry had tended to keep hidden.
The poem also reflects a period in American literature when poets were pushing against formal restraint and public reticence. In that context, Sexton's openness about bodily vulnerability, psychological distress, and female experience helped expand what lyric poetry could say and how directly it could say it.
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