Cinderella
You always read about it:
the plumber with the twelve children
who wins the Irish Sweepstakes.
From toilets to riches.
That story.
Or the nursemaid,
some luscious sweet from Denmark
who captures the oldest son's heart.
from diapers to Dior.
That story.
Or a milkman who serves the wealthy,
eggs, cream, butter, yogurt, milk,
the white truck like an ambulance
who goes into real estate
and makes a pile.
From homogenized to martinis at lunch.
Or the charwoman
who is on the bus when it cracks up
and collects enough from the insurance.
From mops to Bonwit Teller.
That story.
Once
the wife of a rich man was on her deathbed
and she said to her daughter Cinderella:
Be devout. Be good. Then I will smile
down from heaven in the seam of a cloud.
The man took another wife who had
two daughters, pretty enough
but with hearts like blackjacks.
Cinderella was their maid.
She slept on the sooty hearth each night
and walked around looking like Al Jolson.
Her father brought presents home from town,
jewels and gowns for the other women
but the twig of a tree for Cinderella.
She planted that twig on her mother's grave
and it grew to a tree where a white dove sat.
Whenever she wished for anything the dove
would drop it like an egg upon the ground.
The bird is important, my dears, so heed him.
Next came the ball, as you all know.
It was a marriage market.
The prince was looking for a wife.
All but Cinderella were preparing
and gussying up for the event.
Cinderella begged to go too.
Her stepmother threw a dish of lentils
into the cinders and said: Pick them
up in an hour and you shall go.
The white dove brought all his friends;
all the warm wings of the fatherland came,
and picked up the lentils in a jiffy.
No, Cinderella, said the stepmother,
you have no clothes and cannot dance.
That's the way with stepmothers.
Cinderella went to the tree at the grave
and cried forth like a gospel singer:
Mama! Mama! My turtledove,
send me to the prince's ball!
The bird dropped down a golden dress
and delicate little slippers.
Rather a large package for a simple bird.
So she went. Which is no surprise.
Her stepmother and sisters didn't
recognize her without her cinder face
and the prince took her hand on the spot
and danced with no other the whole day.
As nightfall came she thought she'd better
get home. The prince walked her home
and she disappeared into the pigeon house
and although the prince took an axe and broke
it open she was gone. Back to her cinders.
These events repeated themselves for three days.
However on the third day the prince
covered the palace steps with cobbler's wax
and Cinderella's gold shoe stuck upon it.
Now he would find whom the shoe fit
and find his strange dancing girl for keeps.
He went to their house and the two sisters
were delighted because they had lovely feet.
The eldest went into a room to try the slipper on
but her big toe got in the way so she simply
sliced it off and put on the slipper.
The prince rode away with her until the white dove
told him to look at the blood pouring forth.
That is the way with amputations.
They just don't heal up like a wish.
The other sister cut off her heel
but the blood told as blood will.
The prince was getting tired.
He began to feel like a shoe salesman.
But he gave it one last try.
This time Cinderella fit into the shoe
like a love letter into its envelope.
At the wedding ceremony
the two sisters came to curry favor
and the white dove pecked their eyes out.
Two hollow spots were left
like soup spoons.
Cinderella and the prince
lived, they say, happily ever after,
like two dolls in a museum case
never bothered by diapers or dust,
never arguing over the timing of an egg,
never telling the same story twice,
never getting a middle-aged spread,
their darling smiles pasted on for eternity.
Regular Bobbsey Twins.
That story.
Literary Analysis
This literary analysis was generated with AI and may contain interpretive differences. Provide your analysis in the comments section.
Summary
Anne Sexton retells the Cinderella tale as a brisk, satiric parade of fantasy and social climbing. She begins by mocking the familiar rags-to-riches dream in modern terms, linking fairy-tale luck to the kinds of sudden escapes people imagine in ordinary life. From there, the poem moves into the classic plot: the dead mother's blessing, the cruel stepfamily, the magical help at the grave, the ball, the lost slipper, and the final recognition. Yet Sexton's version never lets the old story remain innocent. She keeps interrupting the narrative with sharp asides and contemporary comparisons, making the fairy tale feel both familiar and slightly ridiculous.
At the center stands a tension between wish fulfillment and violence. Cinderella is rewarded, but the road to marriage is full of humiliation, bodily damage, and ruthless competition. The prince's search for a bride resembles a market transaction more than a romance, and the ending mocks the supposed perfection of "happily ever after" by imagining married life as frozen, doll-like, and boring. Sexton both delights in the fairy tale's magic and exposes its hidden cruelty, asking readers to notice how often stories of beauty, rescue, and success depend on fantasy rather than reality.
Theme
- Social fantasy and upward mobility - Sexton opens by comparing Cinderella to modern success stories, suggesting that people cherish tales of sudden escape from poverty or obscurity as much as they love fairy tales.
- Beauty as social currency - The poem treats appearance as the key to recognition and reward, while also showing how shallow and conditional that reward can be.
- Violence beneath enchantment - Behind the sparkling dress and ballroom romance lies mutilation, blood, and punishment, reminding readers that the fairy-tale surface hides harsh realities.
- Critique of marriage and courtship - The prince's search for a bride is framed as a market event, making the romantic ending feel transactional rather than purely loving.
- Motherhood and inheritance - The dead mother remains a guiding presence, but her blessing is filtered through loss, grief, and magical substitution rather than ordinary care.
- The cost of happy endings - The closing image of frozen domestic bliss undercuts the promise of "ever after," implying that perfect endings may be lifeless or self-deceptive.
Literary Devices
- Allusion - Sexton draws on the well-known Cinderella fairy tale and reshapes its familiar events so the reader can see them with fresh, skeptical eyes.
- Irony - The poem repeatedly praises the story while exposing its absurdities, especially in the contrast between magical reward and grim physical violence.
- Colloquial diction - Casual, modern phrases and blunt commentary break the spell of the fairy tale and create a witty, conversational voice.
- Imagery - Concrete details such as cinders, lentils, slippers, blood, and the wedding scene give the poem a vivid physical texture.
- Metaphor - Sexton's comparisons of social ascent to consumer life and marriage to a market deepen the satire of status and romance.
- Simile - Surprising comparisons, especially at the end, make the characters seem artificially preserved rather than truly alive.
- Repetition - The recurring phrase "That story" and other repeated turns create a chant-like rhythm while emphasizing how formulaic such narratives can be.
- Direct address - The poem speaks to the audience with playful comments, as if recounting a tale to listeners who already know the plot.
Symbolism
- The cinders - They symbolize Cinderella's humiliation and low status, but they also mark the starting point from which the fantasy of transformation grows.
- The tree on the mother's grave - This living tree suggests memory, maternal protection, and the possibility that loss can still yield aid and abundance.
- The white dove - The dove represents supernatural help, maternal blessing, and the idealized purity that makes Cinderella's transformation possible.
- The golden dress and slippers - These objects symbolize desirability, social elevation, and the fragile glamour that grants Cinderella entry into the ball.
- The shoe - The slipper becomes a test of identity and a harsh emblem of forced fitting, showing how the story reduces a woman to the shape that suits her best.
- The blood - Blood exposes the violence behind the sisters' ambitions and reveals the moral cost of trying to force oneself into the prize.
Tone
Sexton's tone is comic, skeptical, and sharply knowing, with a playful voice that keeps puncturing the romance of the tale. The emotional atmosphere for the reader shifts between amusement and unease: the poem feels light on the surface because of its quick wit and storybook familiarity, but it also leaves a residue of discomfort as the darker implications of the fairy tale come into focus. The final effect is not sentimental but slyly disenchanted, as if the poem is smiling while exposing the machinery behind the smile.
Historical Context
Anne Sexton's work is often associated with confessional poetry, but her retellings of fairy tales also belong to a wider twentieth-century interest in revisiting traditional stories from more skeptical, psychologically complex angles. In this period, many poets and writers reworked inherited myths and folktales to examine gender roles, domestic ideals, and the pressures placed on women by romantic narratives.
The Cinderella story itself has deep roots in European folktale traditions and has long served as a cultural script for beauty, endurance, and reward. Sexton's version reflects a modern, often feminist impulse to question that script rather than simply repeat it, exposing how fairy tales can naturalize hierarchy, competition, and the fantasy of perfect rescue.
Similar Poems
- The Snow Queen - Hans Christian Andersen
- My Life Had Stood - Emily Dickinson
- Goblin Market - Christina Rossetti
- A Child's Christmas in Wales - Dylan Thomas
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