Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Anne Sexton’s poem "Madame Arrives in the Mail" explores the pervasive sense of desperation and helplessness that drives a person to seek answers in the occult, astrology, or any other source that promises relief from inner turmoil. The poem’s tone is a mixture of cynicism, yearning, and dark humor, revealing the speaker’s deep dissatisfaction with life and her intense desire for something, or someone, to take away her pain.

The poem begins with a seemingly mundane premise: consulting a horoscope. The speaker acknowledges the potential for such an activity to seem "superstitious and childish," yet she implicitly admits her need for it by engaging with it. The horoscope, which might ordinarily be dismissed as frivolous or trivial, becomes a potential source of self-understanding and guidance. The speaker’s plea to "Madame" — a figure who represents the mystical, the otherworldly — reveals a deep yearning for someone or something to "take away" her confusion, sickness, and even the very "odor" that haunts her.

The repeated refrain of "will you take it away?" intensifies as the poem progresses, underscoring the speaker’s escalating desperation. This refrain embodies the core of her struggle: a desperate desire to be free from the burdens that weigh her down, both physically and psychologically. The request to "take! For God's sake take!" is an urgent cry for deliverance, for an intervention that will mend everything that is broken within her.

Sexton’s use of imagery in this poem is strikingly visceral and dark. The moon, often a symbol of guidance and change in poetry, is here imagined as something that could be nailed up "like a sad crucifix" and inspected for its "hair, its roots, its glands." This metaphor suggests a desire to scrutinize and perhaps control the forces of nature or fate that seem to exert such a powerful pull on the speaker’s life. The agony she wishes to see "dropped from me like sand" speaks to a yearning for release from the persistent pain that defines her existence.

Madame, who is invoked throughout the poem, becomes a symbol of this otherworldly power that the speaker hopes will provide relief. The depiction of Madame as "a soft shape" that "hiss[es] as you go" evokes a sense of both comfort and menace, as if Madame embodies the duality of the speaker’s hopes and fears. The reference to "the death of me, the murderous weeds" and the "stallion breathing sulphur" further adds to the ominous tone, suggesting that the speaker’s struggle is not just with external forces but with something deeply rooted and destructive within herself.

The poem’s climax comes in the speaker’s offering of herself to Madame: "I’ll give you a year of me, a kind of iron cast to assess." This line reveals the extent of her willingness to submit to whatever Madame can offer, even if it means giving up a part of herself. The reference to "this Scorpio, this death-bitch me" indicates a recognition of her own dark nature, one that she both fears and embraces. The plea to Madame to "advise, advise" is a last-ditch effort to find some semblance of control or understanding in a life that feels dominated by chaos and despair.

In the final lines, the speaker’s environment mirrors her internal state: "I was only sitting here in my white study / with the awful black words pushing me around." The contrast between the "white study" — a place that should represent clarity and purity — and the "awful black words" that dominate it, encapsulates the tension between the speaker’s desire for peace and the overwhelming darkness that she cannot escape.

"Madame Arrives in the Mail" is a powerful exploration of the lengths to which a person might go to find relief from inner suffering. Through vivid imagery and a tone that shifts between desperate pleading and bitter resignation, Sexton conveys the speaker’s profound sense of disillusionment and her ultimate realization that even the mystical promises of Madame may not be enough to dispel the "awful black words" that plague her. The poem leaves the reader with a haunting sense of the inescapability of certain forms of anguish and the desperate, sometimes futile, search for something that can take it all away.

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