The Division Of Parts
Read 'The Division Of Parts' by 'Anne Sexton' and provide your summary and literary analysis in the comments section below.
The Division Of Parts by Anne Sexton
1.
Mother, my Mary Gray,
once resident of Gloucester
and Essex County,
a photostat of your will
arrived in the mail today.
This is the division of money.
I am one third
of your daughters counting my bounty
or I am a queen alone
in the parlor still,
eating the bread and honey.
It is Good Friday.
Black birds pick at my window sill.
Your coat in my closet,
your bright stones on my hand,
the gaudy fur animals
I do not know how to use,
settle on me like a debt.
A week ago, while the hard March gales
beat on your house,
we sorted your things: obstacles
of letters, family silver,
eyeglasses and shoes.
Like some unseasoned Christmas, its scales
rigged and reset,
I bundled out gifts I did not choose.
Now the houts of The Cross
rewind. In Boston, the devout
work their cold knees
toward that sweet martyrdom
that Christ planned. My timely loss
is too customary to note; and yet
I planned to suffer
and I cannot. It does not please
my yankee bones to watch
where the dying is done
in its usly hours. Black birds peck
at my window glass
and Easter will take its ragged son.
The clutter of worship
that you taught me, Mary Gray,
is old. I imitate
a memory of belief
that I do not own. I trip
on your death and jesus, my stranger
floats up over
my Christian home, wearing his straight
thorn tree. I have cast my lot
and am one third thief
of you. Time, that rearranger
of estates, equips
me with your garments, but not with grief.
2.
This winter when
cancer began its ugliness
I grieved with you each day
for three months
and found you in your private nook
of the medicinal palace
for New England Women
and never once
forgot how long it took.
I read to you
from The New Yorker, ate suppers
you wouldn't eat, fussed
with your flowers,
joked with your nurses, as if I
were the balm among lepers,
as if I could undo
a life in hours
if I never said goodbye.
But you turned old,
all your fifty-eight years sliding
like masks from your skull;
and at the end
I packed your nightgowns in suitcases,
paid the nurses, came riding
home as if I'd been told
I could pretend
people live in places.
3.
Since then I have pretended ease,
loved with the trickeries of need, but not enough
to shed my daughterhood
or sweeten him as a man.
I drink the five o' clock martinis
and poke at this dry page like a rough
goat. Fool! I fumble my lost childhood
for a mother and lounge in sad stuff
with love to catch and catch as catch can.
And Christ still waits. I have tried
to exorcise the memory of each event
and remain still, a mixed child,
heavy with cloths of you.
Sweet witch, you are my worried guide.
Such dangerous angels walk through Lent.
Their walls creak Anne! Convert! Convert!
My desk moves. Its cavr murmurs Boo
and I am taken and beguiled.
Or wrong. For all the way I've come
I'll have to go again. Instead, I must convert
to love as reasonable
as Latin, as sold as earthenware:
an equilibrium
I never knew. And Lent will keep its hurt
for someone else. Christ knows enough
staunch guys have hitched him in trouble.
thinking his sticks were badges to wear.
4.
Spring rusts on its skinny branch
and last summer's lawn
is soggy and brown.
Yesterday is just a number.
All of its winters avalanche
out of sight. What was, is gone.
Mother, last night I slept
in your Bonwit Teller nightgown.
Divided, you climbed into my head.
There in my jabbering dream
I heard my own angry cries
and I cursed you, Dame
keep out of my slumber.
My good Dame, you are dead.
And Mother, three stones
slipped from your glittering eyes.
Now it's Friday's noon
and I would still curse
you with my rhyming words
and bring you flapping back, old love,
old circus knitting, god-in-her-moon,
all fairest in my lang syne verse,
the gauzy bride among the children,
the fancy amid the absurd
and awkward, that horn for hounds
that skipper homeward, that museum
keeper of stiff starfish, that blaze
within the pilgrim woman,
a clown mender, a dove's
cheek among the stones,
my Lady of first words,
this is the division of ways.
And now, while Christ stays
fastened to his Crucifix
so that love may praise
his sacrifice
and not the grotesque metaphor,
you come, a brave ghost, to fix
in my mind without praise
or paradise
to make me your inheritor.
The Division Of Parts Summary and Analysis
Anne Sexton frames this poem as a reckoning with her mother's death, but the emotional action goes beyond mourning. The first section begins with a will and the literal "division of money," yet the inheritance quickly becomes intimate and spiritual: clothing, household objects, religious memory, and a daughter's uneasy sense of what has been passed down. The poem moves through the practical aftermath of death, the days of illness, and then into a present tense of emotional sorting, where the daughter tries to separate love from obligation, grief from habit, and belief from inherited ritual.
Across the poem, the speaker struggles with what it means to receive a mother not only as a person but as a legacy. She repeatedly resists easy consolation: she has the possessions, the memories, and the old religious language, but not a simple or pure grief. The final movement is especially tense, because the speaker ends not with release but with inheritance in a deeper sense. Her mother remains a haunting presence, and the poem suggests that adulthood itself may be an uneasy conversion into a life shaped by what one cannot fully repay, reject, or understand.
Tone in The Division Of Parts
Sexton's tone is intimate, restless, and often unsentimental, moving between affection, bitterness, irony, and sudden tenderness. She speaks as someone trying to think clearly through grief without pretending it is holy or healing. The mood for the reader is uneasy and haunted: the poem feels crowded with memory, religious pressure, and unfinished feeling, so that mourning becomes less a release than a continuing struggle with what the dead leave behind.
This literary analysis was generated with AI and may contain interpretive differences. Provide your analysis in the comments section.
Themes in The Division Of Parts
- Inheritance and ownership - The poem turns a legal inheritance into an emotional and spiritual one, showing that what the daughter receives is not only money and belongings but also memory, identity, and burden.
- Mother-daughter ambivalence - Love, resentment, dependence, and grief all coexist in the speaker's response to her mother, making the relationship feel intimate but never simple.
- Death and mourning - The poem traces the practical and emotional aftermath of dying, while also showing that grief does not arrive in a neat or satisfying form.
- Religion and doubt - Christian imagery fills the poem, but the speaker treats it with tension and irony, suggesting a faith inherited from family rather than fully believed.
- Identity and self-formation - The speaker tries to separate herself from her mother while realizing how deeply she has been shaped by her, making independence feel incomplete.
- Memory as burden - Objects, rituals, and remembered phrases return again and again, making the past feel like something the speaker must carry rather than merely recall.
Literary Devices in The Division Of Parts
- Extended metaphor - The language of inheritance, division, and estate management becomes a larger metaphor for the emotional splitting that follows a mother's death.
- Religious allusion - References to Good Friday, Easter, Lent, Christ, and conversion deepen the poem's meditation on sacrifice, guilt, and redemption.
- Irony - The speaker speaks of grief, holiness, and conversion with a wary edge, exposing the distance between sacred language and lived experience.
- Enjambment - Lines run into one another with a restless flow that mirrors the speaker's unsettled thoughts and emotional uncertainty.
- Imagery - Concrete details such as clothing, birds, flowers, nightgowns, and household objects make grief tactile and specific.
- Metaphor - The mother becomes a guiding presence, a haunting force, and at moments a saintly or witchlike figure, showing the speaker's shifting perception of her.
- Allusion - Biblical and liturgical references connect private loss to larger cultural patterns of suffering and sacrifice.
- Repetition - Returns to the mother, to division, and to religious language reinforce the sense that the speaker cannot stop revisiting the same emotional ground.
Symbolism in The Division Of Parts
- The will - It symbolizes the formal, worldly attempt to divide what cannot really be divided: a mother's life, memory, and influence.
- Clothing - The mother's coat, nightgown, and garments suggest the way identity and intimacy are inherited through physical traces.
- Black birds - These birds suggest death, watchfulness, and an unwelcome reality pressing at the speaker's window.
- Good Friday and Easter - These holy days symbolize suffering, sacrifice, and the possibility of resurrection, though the poem treats that promise cautiously.
- Flowers and flowers in the nurses' setting - They suggest care, fragility, and the attempt to soften illness with ritual tenderness.
- Stones - The "bright stones" and later "three stones" evoke weight, burden, and the fixed facts of inheritance and loss.
Historical Context of The Division Of Parts
Anne Sexton wrote within the confessional poetry movement, a mid-twentieth-century mode that brought private experience, family conflict, mental distress, and bodily vulnerability into public verse. Her work often transforms domestic life and personal loss into intense, dramatized reflection, using direct emotional address and compressed, image-rich language.
The poem also reflects the broader cultural power of Protestant and Catholic imagery in American life, especially the way Christian ritual can shape ideas of suffering, guilt, sacrifice, and redemption even for a doubtful or ambivalent believer. Its emphasis on inheritance, domestic objects, and family roles fits a modern poetic interest in how personal identity is formed by history, class, religion, and memory.
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