Consorting With Angels
Read 'Consorting With Angels' by 'Anne Sexton' and provide your summary and literary analysis in the comments section below.
Consorting With Angels by Anne Sexton
I was tired of being a woman,
tired of the spoons and the post,
tired of my mouth and my breasts,
tired of the cosmetics and the silks.
There were still men who sat at my table,
circled around the bowl I offered up.
The bowl was filled with purple grapes
and the flies hovered in for the scent
and even my father came with his white bone.
But I was tired of the gender things.
Last night I had a dream
and I said to it...
"You are the answer.
You will outlive my husband and my father."
In that dream there was a city made of chains
where Joan was put to death in man's clothes
and the nature of the angels went unexplained,
no two made in the same species,
one with a nose, one with an ear in its hand,
one chewing a star and recording its orbit,
each one like a poem obeying itself,
performing God's functions,
a people apart.
"You are the answer,"
I said, and entered,
lying down on the gates of the city.
Then the chains were fastened around me
and I lost my common gender and my final aspect.
Adam was on the left of me
and Eve was on the right of me,
both thoroughly inconsistent with the world of reason.
We wove our arms together
and rode under the sun.
I was not a woman anymore,
not one thing or the other.
O daughters of Jerusalem,
the king has brought me into his chamber.
I am black and I am beautiful.
I've been opened and undressed.
I have no arms or legs.
I'm all one skin like a fish.
I'm no more a woman
than Christ was a man.
Consorting With Angels Summary and Analysis
Anne Sexton's poem begins in exhaustion and refusal. The woman at the center of the poem is weary not only of domestic life and adornment but of the entire set of expectations attached to femininity. Ordinary objects and rituals, from spoons to cosmetics, feel like signs of a role she can no longer bear. Yet the poem does not stop at rejection; it moves into dream, vision, and transformation, where the speaker imagines a realm beyond ordinary identity and social categories.
That visionary middle section shifts from the cramped world of gendered life to a strange city of chains and angels. Joan of Arc, Adam and Eve, and the angels themselves become figures through which the speaker tests what it might mean to leave behind fixed identity. The poem's climax is a paradoxical self-emptying: the speaker enters a new state that is at once imprisonment and freedom, loss and revelation. By the end, the body has been remade into something beyond simple masculine or feminine definition, and the poem claims a startling liberation through the refusal of ordinary human labels.
Tone in Consorting With Angels
Sexton's tone is defiant, intimate, and visionary, with a movement from weariness into ecstatic self-redefinition. The voice sounds both wounded and insistent, as if the poem were arguing itself toward freedom. For the reader, the mood is unsettled and dreamlike, shifting from domestic fatigue to visionary strangeness and finally to a kind of unsettling triumph that feels hard-won rather than serene.
This literary analysis was generated with AI and may contain interpretive differences. Provide your analysis in the comments section.
Themes in Consorting With Angels
- Rejection of gender roles - The poem is driven by the speaker's exhaustion with the social meanings attached to being a woman, from appearance to domestic performance, and by her desire to escape those expectations.
- Transformation through loss of identity - Instead of selfhood being strengthened by definition, the poem imagines release as a kind of undoing, in which the speaker abandons fixed gender and becomes something larger and stranger.
- Spiritual longing - The dream of angels, biblical figures, and sacred language suggests a search for a mode of being that transcends ordinary life and enters a more visionary, religious register.
- Conflict between body and transcendence - The body is described through desire, weariness, and vulnerability, but the poem also reaches toward a state beyond the body's social meanings, creating tension between physical identity and spiritual escape.
- Female power and constraint - Women are figured both as constrained by cultural roles and as capable of powerful self-redefinition, especially through the speaker's refusal to remain confined by the gender assigned to her.
- Multiplicity of identity - The poem resists any single stable self, presenting identity as shifting, contradictory, and composed of many states at once.
Literary Devices in Consorting With Angels
- Free verse - The loose, uneven movement of the lines suits the poem's restless thought and its refusal of stable form, mirroring the speaker's rejection of fixed identity.
- Anaphora - The repeated word 'tired' intensifies the speaker's resentment and creates a pounding rhythm of exhaustion that opens the poem.
- Symbolism - Images such as chains, angels, grapes, and the city stand for larger states of confinement, transcendence, desire, and transformation rather than remaining merely literal.
- Biblical allusion - References to Adam, Eve, Joan of Arc, Jerusalem, and Christ place the poem in a sacred and historical framework, giving the speaker's struggle a mythic scale.
- Paradox - The poem repeatedly joins opposites, such as captivity and freedom or gender and its loss, to show that liberation in this vision comes through contradiction.
- Metaphor - The dream city, the chains, and the angelic bodies operate as extended metaphors for psychological and spiritual states beyond ordinary life.
- Imagery - Vivid bodily and visual images, from grapes and flies to a fishlike body, make the poem physically immediate even as it moves into abstraction.
- Direct address - The poem speaks in a declarative, self-addressed voice that gives the vision urgency and makes the inner drama feel intimate and immediate.
Symbolism in Consorting With Angels
- Spoons and post - These ordinary domestic objects suggest routine, duty, and the everyday world of prescribed feminine labor that the speaker wants to escape.
- Cosmetics and silks - These images symbolize surface femininity, beauty culture, and the pressure to perform womanhood as appearance.
- The bowl of purple grapes - The bowl can suggest offering, abundance, fertility, and bodily pleasure, but also a display meant for others to consume.
- Flies - The flies hovering near the grapes hint at decay, unwanted attention, or the corruption that shadows what is offered to others.
- Chains - The chain city suggests bondage, discipline, and suffering, yet it also becomes the gateway to a new state of being.
- Joan of Arc - Joan functions as a symbol of female defiance, martyrdom, and the crossing of gender boundaries through courage and dress.
- Adam and Eve - The first human pair symbolize inherited gender duality and the limits of ordinary human categories.
- Fishlike body - The final image of being 'all one skin like a fish' suggests a stripped, elemental self that has been reduced beyond conventional human identity.
Historical Context of Consorting With Angels
Anne Sexton is strongly associated with confessional poetry, a mid-20th-century mode that turns personal experience, mental distress, family life, sexuality, and social pressure into deeply dramatized lyric art. Her work often confronts the roles available to women in postwar American culture and tests the costs of those roles on the self.
This poem also draws on a broader tradition of modern poetry that reimagines religious and biblical material in personal, psychological, and feminist terms. Its use of Joan of Arc, Adam and Eve, and angelic imagery places it in conversation with literary and theological traditions that question the limits of gender, embodiment, and sanctity.
Poems Similar to Consorting With Angels
Turn off ads, get more exposure for your poetry, and get more features with a
Premium Membership.
