Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Anne Sexton’s "The Author of the Jesus Papers Speaks" offers a surreal exploration of religious iconography, femininity, and sacrifice, presented through vivid and unsettling imagery. The poem engages with themes of creation, destruction, and the intersection of the sacred and the profane, ultimately questioning the nature of sacrifice and the ways in which it is intertwined with gender and divinity.

The poem begins with a dream sequence where the speaker is milking a cow. The udder, described as a "great rubber lily," is an image that combines both the natural and the artificial, setting the tone for the blending of reality and surrealism that follows. The expectation of "moon juice" — a phrase that evokes purity, nourishment, and celestial influence — is subverted when blood, instead of milk, spurts out. This shocking and grotesque image disrupts the pastoral scene and introduces a sense of violence and corruption. The blood covering the speaker with "shame" suggests an involuntary initiation into a world where the divine and the brutal coexist.

The appearance of God in the dream, who offers cryptic pronouncements, adds a layer of complexity to the poem. The statement "People say only good things about Christmas. If they want to say something bad, they whisper" reflects the societal tendency to suppress negative truths about revered traditions, particularly religious ones. It hints at the darker undercurrents that accompany the celebration of sacred events, where suffering and sacrifice are often obscured by the veneer of holiness.

The second part of the dream involves the speaker drawing a baby from the "hollow water" of a well, an image that evokes both birth and baptism, but in a strange and almost sinister context. Water, often symbolizing life and purity, becomes "hollow," suggesting emptiness or a lack of substance. The act of drawing a baby from this water aligns with creation myths but is tinged with a sense of unnaturalness, as if the birth is not entirely blessed.

God’s next command, to take a "gingerbread lady" and put her in the oven, introduces a domestic and mundane activity, but one that is imbued with symbolic weight. The gingerbread figure, typically associated with innocence and childhood, becomes a stand-in for sacrificial victims. The reference to "beautiful women" as sacrifices connects to broader themes of female martyrdom and the commodification of women’s bodies in both religious and societal contexts.

The final lines, "When the cow gives blood / and the Christ is born / we must all eat sacrifices. / We must all eat beautiful women," are both disturbing and thought-provoking. The image of the cow giving blood, juxtaposed with the birth of Christ, links the life-giving aspect of motherhood (both human and animal) with violence and loss. The command to "eat sacrifices" and "eat beautiful women" is a jarring conflation of consumption, sacrifice, and the objectification of the feminine. It suggests that within the structures of religious and cultural rituals, the female body becomes a site of both veneration and violation, where beauty is both exalted and destroyed.

In "The Author of the Jesus Papers Speaks," Sexton critiques the intersection of religion, sacrifice, and gender, using surreal and symbolic imagery to challenge the reader's perceptions of sacredness and sin. The poem reveals the often-hidden violence that underpins rituals of creation and redemption, and it forces a confrontation with the uncomfortable truths that linger beneath the surface of cultural and religious traditions. Through its dreamlike narrative and provocative imagery, the poem becomes a powerful commentary on the roles that women are often forced to play in the enactment of societal and religious sacrifices.

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