Wow you guys did a pretty good breakdown of the poem already!
The religious symbolism is very prevalent in this poem and I don't see anything else worth mentioning that hasn't been caught by y'all yet. Sexton's emphasis on "VENUS IS GREEN" shows that she portrayed Venus to be her Eden and the poem really revolves around this concept. I agree that Sexton did use a different tone in voice when describing the life on Venus, but I wouldn't necessarily say it was cheerful. It was more of a caressing tone toward something she saw as a rebirth from someplace horrible rather than something to be cheerful or chipper about.
Y'all had mentioned the level of imagery in the poem and I have to agree that the descriptions of the land and the animals are significantly rich. But what about the two Ph.D's or the exact number of each item boarded onto the missile as described in the first paragraph? For me, I feel like Sexton was addressing the fact that our advancement in technology is the real reason to the dismal state of mind in society. The definite quantities of the supplies, like "exactly fifty fish creatures" and "three almost new snakes", seems to bash the idea that society is so preoccupied with standardized methods that they can't appreciate any real advancement in life. Thus, when the two Ph.D's find Venus and notify the people back home about it, no one on Earth cares. They are so focused on the problems within them that they are blinded to this newly found Eden.
I read into the biography of Anne Sexton (it was the tab called "About this poem" in the same window as the poem) and found out that she had been suffering from mental illnesses and wrote many of her poems about it. They were mainly autobiographical and focused on her personal feelings, such as anguish. Also, the biography mentioned that Sexton was a "confessional poet" in that she emphasized personal information about her own life that were sometimes intimate and dark. Do y'all think this is a confessional poem? How so?
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