Anne Sexton’s The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975) stands as one of the most haunting and complex works in her poetic canon. Written near the end of her life, the collection represents a profound spiritual turn that both surprises and deepens her earlier confessional style. Rather than offering a conventional religious conversion narrative, the poems chart a turbulent, often painful journey toward belief that is inseparable from doubt, suffering, and existential struggle. The significance of The Awful Rowing Toward God lies in how it redefines religious poetry through a confessional lens, transforming faith into a lived, contested, and deeply human experience.

This essay explores the thematic, stylistic, and cultural importance of the collection, situating it within Anne Sexton’s broader body of work and within twentieth-century American poetry.

Context: Anne Sexton’s Late Poetic Period

From Confession to Spiritual Inquiry

Anne Sexton is often associated with confessional poetry, a movement characterized by intense self-revelation, psychological honesty, and engagement with taboo subjects such as mental illness, sexuality, and suicide. Earlier collections like Live or Die and Love Poems foreground the body and the psyche, often confronting despair with startling directness.

The Awful Rowing Toward God marks a shift in focus rather than a break. The confessional mode remains intact, but the subject matter expands from personal trauma to metaphysical longing. Sexton’s speakers are no longer only grappling with the self; they are grappling with God. This transition reflects a late-career urgency, as the poet turns toward questions of meaning, redemption, and transcendence.

Biographical Undercurrents

Written during a period of intense psychological distress, the collection cannot be separated from Sexton’s lived experience. Her struggles with depression and repeated hospitalizations inform the poems’ tone of exhaustion and yearning. However, the significance of the work lies in its refusal to sentimentalize suffering. Faith is not presented as a cure, but as a difficult and often frightening possibility.

The Meaning of “Awful Rowing”

Spiritual Effort as Struggle

The title The Awful Rowing Toward God encapsulates the book’s central metaphor. Rowing suggests effort, repetition, and slow progress, while “awful” carries both modern and archaic meanings: terrible, overwhelming, and filled with awe. Faith, in Sexton’s vision, is not a passive state of belief but a laborious, painful movement toward something both desired and feared.

This metaphor rejects the notion of effortless grace. Instead, it presents spirituality as a strenuous, ongoing act that demands endurance. The speaker rows not because certainty is guaranteed, but because remaining still is unbearable.

Distance and Desire

Rowing also implies distance. God is not immediately present but located across an expanse that must be crossed through sustained effort. This spatial metaphor reinforces the book’s theological tension: God is real enough to pursue but distant enough to doubt. The act of rowing becomes a symbol of desire itself, a reaching toward meaning without assurance of arrival.

God as Presence and Absence

An Uncomfortable Divinity

One of the most striking aspects of The Awful Rowing Toward God is Sexton’s portrayal of God as unsettling rather than comforting. God appears as vast, inscrutable, and sometimes terrifying. This depiction aligns more closely with biblical and mystical traditions than with sentimental religious poetry.

Anne Sexton does not attempt to domesticate the divine. Instead, she confronts God as a force that destabilizes identity and challenges human autonomy. The poems resist easy reverence, favoring confrontation over consolation.

Faith Without Resolution

Importantly, the collection does not end with spiritual resolution. There is no moment of final conversion or peace. The poems remain suspended in tension, reflecting a faith that exists alongside fear and doubt. This unresolved quality is central to the work’s significance, as it honors the complexity of belief rather than simplifying it.

Language, Imagery, and Poetic Technique

Everyday Speech and Sacred Themes

Sexton’s language in The Awful Rowing Toward God remains characteristically direct and conversational, even as it addresses theological questions. This stylistic choice collapses the distance between the sacred and the ordinary. God is approached not through elevated liturgical diction but through the language of daily life.

This blending of the mundane and the divine underscores Sexton’s belief that spirituality is inseparable from embodied experience. The poems suggest that God is encountered not outside life’s messiness but within it.

Imagery of Water, Body, and Light

Recurring images of water, physical vulnerability, and illumination reinforce the collection’s spiritual concerns. Water symbolizes both danger and passage, while bodily imagery grounds metaphysical longing in physical reality. Light appears intermittently as a promise of insight, but never fully dispels darkness.

These images work together to create a sensory theology, one that understands faith as something felt as much as believed.

Theological Significance and Modern Faith

A Postmodern Religious Voice

The significance of The Awful Rowing Toward God extends beyond Sexton’s personal journey. The collection offers a model of religious poetry suited to a modern, skeptical age. Faith is not assumed; it is interrogated. God is not inherited; God is sought.

In this sense, Anne Sexton articulates a postmodern spirituality that resonates with readers who feel alienated from institutional religion but remain haunted by spiritual longing. The poems acknowledge disbelief without surrendering to nihilism.

Redefining Confessional Poetry

By turning confessional poetry toward theological questions, Sexton expands the genre’s scope. The self remains central, but it is now positioned in relation to the divine rather than as the final authority. This shift challenges the accusation that confessional poetry is inherently narcissistic, demonstrating its capacity for metaphysical depth.

Legacy and Critical Importance

A Courageous Late Work

The Awful Rowing Toward God is significant in part because of its timing. Written late in Sexton’s career, it represents a willingness to confront new questions rather than repeat established themes. This artistic risk enhances the collection’s power and authenticity.

The poems feel urgent and unguarded, as though written against time. This urgency lends them a raw intensity that continues to move readers decades later.

Influence on Contemporary Spiritual Poetry

The collection has influenced later poets who explore faith outside traditional frameworks. Its blend of skepticism, vulnerability, and reverence has become a touchstone for writers seeking to articulate belief without certainty.

Conclusion

The significance of The Awful Rowing Toward God lies in its fearless engagement with faith as struggle rather than solution. Anne Sexton transforms the act of believing into a poetic journey marked by effort, doubt, and longing. The collection refuses easy answers, offering instead an honest portrayal of what it means to seek God while carrying pain, fear, and uncertainty.

By merging confessional intensity with theological inquiry, Anne Sexton creates a work that is both deeply personal and broadly resonant. The Awful Rowing Toward God remains a vital contribution to modern poetry precisely because it acknowledges that faith, like life, is often awful, arduous, and yet profoundly necessary.