The Use of Syntactic, Phonological, Graphological Devices in The Poem Her Kind by Anne Sexton

Through history were created different stereotypes and attitudes towards women which vary from culture to culture. Most of the societies see women as an object which has a specific role. The role is to be an obedient housewife, to give birth to children, raise them and to sit at home and cook meals for a beloved husband. The one which does everything is a ‘perfect woman’ and the one which rebel, does not meet social standards, is condemned and ‘burned at the stake’. Anne Sexton’s poem ‘Her Kind’ is a feminist poem which deals with exalted negative stereotypes which women meet every day. It tries to capture the idea of the woman with several personalities, which do not like the restrictions and norms created around. The woman does not want to be like others want her to be, she just wants to be herself.

In this poem, Anne Sexton uses rich foregrounding elements to reveal how a woman, through different constructs of a possessed witch, housewife and adulteress, collides with dominating powers and reacts to occurring boundaries. The poem is multi-layered by metaphors and symbols. The whole poem might be considered as an extended metaphor itself; the speaker is comparing herself to a witch, herewith, she is a metaphor for every woman who happens to share her feelings and position in life.

Different images are drawn to describe the ‘witch’, which is an outcast in the standard society. A dark atmosphere is created through the words ‘possessed, haunting, dreaming evil, and twelve-fingered’. However, the use of the oxymoron ‘dreaming evil’ indicates into that the ‘witch’ is not that evil as the society tries to picture her, because dreams are positive images on contrary to nightmares. Lines ‘your flames still bite my thigh/ and my ribs crack where your wheels wind’ symbolize the metaphor of how harsh the attitude and the oppression were towards ‘different women’. The metaphor is emphasised with the onomatopoeia ‘ribs crack’ which is used to create the impression of sensual immediacy, to make the reader feel somehow closer to that reality.

Sexton also used repetition to incorporate readers into this poem, ‘I have been her kind’ is repeated in each stanza to create fluidity in the whole poem, defining speaker’s identity in each stanza, that she's confident about who she is and who she's been. The repetition of words ‘I have’, ‘A woman like that is’ creates a feeling of a declaration or even a mantra, with which help we feel closer to the issue raised in the poem. Through this, we can understand that every woman, in some form, is potentially the speaker’s ‘kind’ Witches, their hunts, mystical creatures, and other metaphorical imagery of paranormal elements are transmitted through numbers three and seven, which in the magical world are considered sacred. The poetess uses them to remind us about abnormality in which a woman exists when she is different.

The three stanzas of seven lines in a poem do not form any distinct term. It is not a sonnet, nor a villanelle. The lines with nine syllables and some with ten and eleven take the reader further away from convention. Nevertheless, it has a tight rhyme and loose rhythm. From the lines like ‘have gone out, ’ ‘the black air, ’ ‘out of mind, ’ ‘the warm caves, ’ ‘where your flames’ we can see that the dominant trisyllables are of anapaestic feet, which stresses out the last syllable, making the poem sound a little faster in pace, yet immediately slowing down the lines, by the choice of the stressed syllables i. e. the words ‘out’, ‘air’ ‘caves’, ‘flames’, which have long vowels. It is slowed down even more by abrupt use of spondaic feet, ‘her kind, ’ ‘bright routes, ’ ‘wheels wind. ’ Such fast-slow pace intentions are as well presented both through end stop line and enjambment. A line breaks suggest a pause ‘A woman like that is not a woman, quite. ’. The enjambment, by contrast, has the opposite effect of speeding up the poem, since one line runs-on into the next instead of getting resolved at the end ‘dreaming evil I have done my hitch / over the plain houses, light by light. ’ Such usage of punctuation and meter conveys an uneven motion which delivers a sense of a rush by the speaker to express herself by emphasizing specific parts and shifts of her position in a society.

Despite that the meter is irregular in this poem, poetess manages to transmit the rhyme, alliteration, assonance and give a euphonious sounding to the poem. The rhyme scheme of ‘Her Kind’ is ABABCBC DEDECFC GHGHCHC, with an ending rhyme pattern identical in the first and third stanzas and only slightly varied in the second. Once again using the structure Anne Sexton revolts against the usual norms, refusing to be as expected, as well as, the main speaker of the poem. In the first stanza, the ending rhymes have short or long vowels and sharp ending consonants as in ‘witch’ and ‘hitch’ or, ‘light’ and ‘quite’ and into the second stanza Sexton incorporates longer vowels with softer ending consonants. The third seven-line stanza is expressed by using ending as ‘villages going by, ’ ‘where your flames still bite my thigh’ and ‘not ashamed to die’, such lengthened ending vowels with their full word meanings produce the sense of despair and melancholy.

All in all, with the help of syntactic, phonological, graphological deviation, and repetition the poem flows from one scene to the next, from simple statements to sharp insights and dark pictures. Through metaphorical expressions, Anne Sexton in ‘Her Kind’ presents a woman which does not want to follow an ordinary lifestyle. The speaker is considered to be a ‘black sheep’ by the established monotonous norms of the society. However, the speaker welcomes differentially, developing the main idea that it does not matter whether someone is distinct, because if someone is different not necessarily evil.