The Expatriates

Anne Sexton’s poem “The Expatriates” appears in her 1960 debut collection, To Bedlam and Part Way Back. Sexton is a key figure of the American Confessional poetry movement, and this personal lyric highlights many of the defining features of both her poetry and the Confessional movement. “The Expatriates” is an expression of loss and forbidden love.

Poet Biography

Anne Sexton was born in Massachusetts in 1928 as Anne Gray Harvey. She was the youngest of three daughters and spent much of her childhood in Boston. Her father’s success in business meant that her family was wealthy; despite this financial ease, Sexton’s childhood was difficult and fraught with emotional abuse. As a child, Anne’s closest family member was her unmarried great-aunt. In high school, Sexton left her family home to attend boarding school and one year of college. Before she turned 20, Anne married Alfred “Kayo” Sexton.

After her marriage, Sexton worked as a fashion model. She later had two daughters. Sexton also suffered a psychological breakdown that landed her in a psychiatric hospital around this time. Sexton received therapy, residing in and out of psychiatric hospitals for the remainder of her life, and it was in treatment that her therapist first encouraged her to write. Sexton began writing prolifically, joining writing groups and classes where she met poets like Sylvia Plath, Maxine Kumin, and Robert Lowell. After only a few years of writing, Sexton published her first book, To Bedlam and Part Way Back, in 1960 at the age of 32.

Anne Sexton went on to publish seven more books of poetry, finding explosive success in the art. In addition to winning the Pulitzer Prize for her third book of poems, Live or Die, Sexton received many awards, fellowships, grants, and honorary degrees during her lifetime. Her struggle with mental health continued throughout her life until she committed suicide in 1975 at the age of 46. A key figure of the Confessional poetry movement, Sexton’s influence and popularity continue to this day.

Poem Text

Sexton, Anne. “The Expatriates.” 1960. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

Anne Sexton’s “The Expatriates” is written in the first person, recounting the speaker’s reflections on a romantic moment with a lover in a New England forest in the winter.

The poem makes an announcement at the start of the first stanza in a direct address to an unnamed audience member: “My dear, it was a moment / to clutch at for a moment” (Lines 1, 2). The speaker reveals the concrete details of this moment slowly, introducing the forest setting in the second stanza of the poem. The forest, the location of the aforementioned “moment” (Line 1), is made up of “misplanted Norwegian trees” (Line 7), all of which are out of place and alien in New England. The motif of the trees continues into the third stanza, where the speaker asserts that, in this forest, each tree must live “their lives / filed out in exile” (Lines 15, 16).

The speaker goes on to recall, in the fourth stanza, that they must sleep separately from their lover, in “single beds” (Line 20). Amongst the trees in the forest, however, the speaker remembers being held by their lover, “here in the woods where the woods were caught / in their dying” (Lines 22-23). The fifth stanza contains the speaker’s dream of the past, in which the forest can be “whole” (Line 24). The speaker interrupts their own dream with a vision of “our house,” where they see “men / holding up their foreign ground for you and me” (Lines 28-29).

In the final stanza, the speaker addresses their audience member directly, repeating the term of endearment from the first line of the poem. The speaker insists that they must talk about the moment of romance they experienced now, though it is “butchered from time” (Line 31). For the speaker of the poem, the only way to keep from “los[ing] the sound” (Line 33) of the moment is to talk about it.