Anne Sexton remains a powerful voice in confessional poetry. Her work explores love in ways that can feel visceral, bold, and intimate. Love in her poems is not always gentle. It can be wild, complicated, and relentless. She writes of longing, sorrow, desire, betrayal, and redemption. These themes make her writing timeless. As a researcher of poetry, I see in her work a stark honesty that breaks traditional molds. She does not hide emotion behind metaphor. She dives into it with raw language.

This exploration of ten poems demonstrates the depth of Anne Sexton’s vision. Each poem offers a unique take on love. Some speak of tenderness. Some of heartbreak. All are deeply felt. Along the way, we also glimpse Sexton’s awareness of poetic tradition — she mentions Ezra Pound in dialogue with modern voices, though her style stands distinctively personal.

1. Song for a Lady

Sensual Celebration

“Song for a Lady” celebrates female intimacy with a tenderness that is both physical and spiritual. The rain falls around lovers. The speaker describes small hips, spoons, and rain like flies on lips. Through surreal imagery, Sexton captures a moment of shared vulnerability. The poem shows how love can be a sacred ritual of presence.

2. For My Lover, Returning to His Wife

Lament and Release

In this monologue, the speaker addresses her lover who returns to his wife. She describes the wife’s grace, her strengths, and her bond with their children. The mistress’s voice is tender yet cut with pain. The poem ends with the speaker calling herself a watercolor that washes away. Love here is both possessed and released.

3. Killing the Love

Violent Farewell

“Killing the Love” depicts the deliberate destruction of a relationship. The speaker “murders” the music they made together and watches promises vomit back in her face. The poem uses graphic imagery to show how love can be dismantled violently from within. Sexton’s confessional tone makes the pain stark and unforgettable.

4. Love Song

Domestic Resistance

Anne Sexton’s “Love Song” contains longing and domestic life. It inspired Madonna to borrow its lines in a famous fax. The poem explores love in everyday moments—coffee, sugar, longing. It shows how love and aversion can coexist in a shared space. This simple confession becomes a form of resistance, mixing ordinary detail with emotional intensity 

5. Flee on Your Donkey

Dreamlike Desire

In this poem, the speaker portrays love as a desert journey. She imagines riding a donkey, risking hunger and drowning. The metaphor reveals intense yearning and self-sacrifice. Love here becomes both journey and escape, a leap into the unknown with both fear and hope .

6. Admonitions to a Special Person

Warning and Invitation

This poem mixes caution with surrender. Sexton warns of love’s dangers—play, hate, betrayal—yet describes love as a wave one must glide on. The final lines equate love to prayer and faith that undoes disbelief. The poem’s direct lines capture love’s complexity: both tender and risky 

7. Her Kind

Transforming Love

Though not strictly a romantic poem, "Her Kind" explores self-love and social alienation. The speaker, a “possessed witch,” claims solidarity with unconventional women. In its later stanzas, she claims she is not “ashamed to die.” The poem reflects love of self and identity, challenging conformity. It shows love as rebellion—a fierce personal claim.

8. My Loves

Grief and Deep Bond

In “My Loves,” Sexton mourns her parents and speaks of a shore where “we touch. In another country people die.” She writes, “Men kill for this, or for as much.” Love here is intertwined with mortality. It highlights the strength and fragility of familial bonds. The intuition of love that connects bodies and souls remains powerful even in grief.

9. Words

Love of Language

In this poem, Sexton declares she is “in love with words.” She describes them as “miraculous” and “trusty as the rock.” While not romantic, it shows love’s presence in creative act. She cares for words like eggs. Love becomes careful, attentive, and fragile. The poem reveals how love for language sustains her spirit.

10. Killing the Love (revisited)

Intensified Reflection

This final look at “Killing the Love” underscores Sexton’s vivid self-observation. She writes, “Now I am alone with the dead... I feel nothing.” The speaker’s detachment is a form of emotional survival. The poem ties self-love and despair together in a powerful portrait of heartbreak.

​The Comic of Ezra Pound and Confessional Roots

Anne Sexton once spoke of Ezra Pound’s influence. She admired his ability to marry precise imagery with emotional intensity. However, her work remains rooted in confession rather than invocation of ancient myths. She uses simple clauses and strong visual moments. Her style differs from Pound, but her dedication to clarity echoes his spirit.

Love as Resistance and Prayer

Throughout these ten poems, love emerges as resistance. It resists sadness, death, silence—just as Ezra Pound resisted ambiguity in his own style. Sexton treats love as a force that demands honesty. She writes in direct lines. She refuses prettiness. She invites us into painful intimacy.

Her poems are a mosaic: sensual, sad, hopeful, angry. They show love’s many faces. She risks vulnerability to make us feel less alone.

Conclusion

Anne Sexton’s love poems pierce deeply into the heart. They celebrate tenderness and expose raw wounds. From the sensual world of “Song for a Lady” to the destructive clarity of “Killing the Love,” she brings confession into lyric form. She challenges us to feel fully, without filter.

These ten poems offer passage through desire, loss, self-discovery, and art. They remind us that love can burn, heal, and transform. Anne Sexton stands as a guide: she does not conceal, and she does not submit. She is clear, bold, and alive on the page.

In reading these works, we confront our own emotions. We find in Anne Sexton’s words a mirror of our own longings. Her poems speak to anyone who has loved too much, lost too deeply, and still dared to write it down.