Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Anne Sexton's "A Story for Rose on the Midnight Flight to Boston" is a poignant exploration of memory, trauma, and the complexities of storytelling. The poem weaves together the narrator's reflections on past experiences with a friend named Betsy, contrasting the ordinary, humdrum days of their youth with the sudden, tragic end of Betsy's life. Through vivid imagery and introspective language, Sexton delves into the haunting effects of loss and the ways in which we turn memories into stories—sometimes to cope, sometimes to make sense of the inexplicable.

The poem opens with a reflection on the separation of past experiences, described as "separate specialties, / different stories, the best of their own worst." This line suggests that the narrator has compartmentalized memories, keeping them distinct and perhaps sanitized in a way that allows her to deal with them. As she rides in the "warm cabin" of the airplane, she recalls Betsy's laughter, drawing a connection between Betsy and Rose, the person to whom the poem is addressed. The mention of plotting in the "humdrum / school for proper girls" evokes a sense of youthful ambition and dreams, plans made in the innocence of adolescence.

However, this nostalgic recollection is abruptly interrupted by a shift to a memory of fear and failure: "The next April the plane / bucked me like a horse, my elevators turned / and fear blew down my throat." The imagery here is visceral, capturing the physical and emotional turmoil of a turbulent flight. The narrator's fear is tangible, a stark contrast to the earlier lightheartedness of plotting future adventures. This experience marks her "first story, [her] funny failure," a moment of vulnerability that stands in contrast to the safety and security she had imagined for herself.

The poem then transitions to a darker memory: the tragic death of Betsy in a mid-air collision. "Betsy's / story; the April night of the civilian air crash / and her sudden name misspelled in the evening paper" reflects the cold, impersonal nature of how death is often reported and remembered. The misspelling of Betsy's name underscores the finality and indifference of the world to individual lives, a small yet significant detail that highlights the erasure of personal identity in the face of tragedy.

The description of the crash itself is harrowing: "two planes cracking / in mid-air over Washington, like blind birds." This simile emphasizes the randomness and senselessness of the event, comparing the planes to "blind birds," creatures of the sky that, despite their natural domain, collide and fall. The aftermath is equally disturbing, with "morticians tracking / bodies in the Potomac and piecing them like boards / to make a leg or a face." The imagery here is stark and clinical, reducing the human body to mere parts to be reassembled, a process that strips away individuality and reduces the dead to objects of reconstruction.

As the poem progresses, the narrator reveals that she has "made [Betsy] into a story / that [she] grew to know and savor." This admission reflects the way in which we sometimes transform real-life tragedies into narratives that we can manage, stories that allow us to contain and control the overwhelming emotions associated with loss. However, the narrator also acknowledges the danger in this: "A reason to worry, / Rose, when you fix on an old death like that, / and outliving the impact, to find you've pretended." The act of turning Betsy's death into a story has created a distance, a sense of unreality that the narrator recognizes as potentially harmful, a way of "pretending" that the raw pain has been processed when it may not have been.

The poem concludes with the narrator's return to the present: "We bank over Boston. I am safe. I put on my hat. / I am almost someone going home. The story has ended." The repetition of "I am safe" contrasts with the earlier turbulence and the memory of Betsy's death, underscoring the narrator's desire to feel secure and grounded. Yet, the phrase "I am almost someone going home" suggests a lingering sense of incompleteness or disconnection, as if the act of recounting Betsy's story has left the narrator in a liminal space, caught between past and present, memory and reality.

In "A Story for Rose on the Midnight Flight to Boston," Sexton masterfully blends personal memory with broader themes of loss, identity, and the power of storytelling. The poem is a meditation on how we cope with the traumas of the past, how we turn them into narratives that both preserve and distance us from our experiences, and how, in the end, we are left navigating the space between who we were and who we are becoming.

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