The Rev. Dr. John Tamilio III

 © 2022. All rights reserved.

T.S. Eliot is not the only poet I love.  There are many others: Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, Geoffrey Hill.  I especially love Anne Sexton.

Sexton was a twentieth-century poet who lived in Newton and taught at Boston University.  Her poetry is amazing: opening candid windows on reality and one’s understanding of the self (sometimes in abstract ways) and society writ large.  Because of her honesty, and willingness to tackle taboo subjects, her verse is often called confessional poetry.

Sexton, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1967 for her book Live or Die, committed suicide.  On October 4, 1974, she had lunch with fellow writer Maxine Kumin to discuss the final draft of her forthcoming book The Awful Rowing Toward God.  When she got home that day, “she put on her mother’s old fur coat, removed all her rings, poured herself a glass of vodka, locked herself in her garage, and started the engine of her car, ending her life by carbon monoxide poisoning.”[1]

I visited Anne Sexton’s grave at Forest Hills Cemetery in Jamaica Plain several years ago.  I took pictures of her headstone and reflected on my admiration for the poet in a poem of my own, which I do not like all that much.

One of Sexton’s more celebrated poems is entitled “45 Mercy Street.”  It reads:

In my dream,

drilling into the marrow

of my entire bone,

my real dream,

I’m walking up and down Beacon Hill

searching for a street sign —

namely MERCY STREET.

Not there.

 

I try the Back Bay.

Not there.

Not there.

And yet I know the number.

45 Mercy Street.

I know the stained-glass window

of the foyer,

the three flights of the house

with its parquet floors.

I know the furniture and

mother, grandmother, great-grandmother,

the servants.

I know the cupboard of Spode

the boat of ice, solid silver,

where the butter sits in neat squares

like strange giant’s teeth

on the big mahogany table.

I know it well.

Not there.

 

Where did you go?

45 Mercy Street,

with great-grandmother

kneeling in her whale-bone corset

and praying gently but fiercely

to the wash basin,

at five A.M.

at noon

dozing in her wiggy rocker,

grandfather taking a nap in the pantry,

grandmother pushing the bell for the downstairs maid,

and Nana rocking Mother with an oversized flower

on her forehead to cover the curl

of when she was good and when she was…

And where she was begat

and in a generation

the third she will beget,

me,

with the stranger’s seed blooming

into the flower called Horrid.

 

I walk in a yellow dress

and a white pocketbook stuffed with cigarettes,

enough pills, my wallet, my keys,

and being twenty-eight, or is it forty-five?

I walk. I walk.

I hold matches at street signs

for it is dark,

as dark as the leathery dead

and I have lost my green Ford,

my house in the suburbs,

two little kids

sucked up like pollen by the bee in me

and a husband

who has wiped off his eyes

in order not to see my inside out

and I am walking and looking

and this is no dream

just my oily life

where the people are alibis

and the street is unfindable for an

entire lifetime.

 

Pull the shades down —

I don’t care!

Bolt the door, mercy,

erase the number,

rip down the street sign,

what can it matter,

what can it matter to this cheapskate

who wants to own the past

that went out on a dead ship

and left me only with paper?

 

Not there.

 

I open my pocketbook,

as women do,

and fish swim back and forth

between the dollars and the lipstick.

I pick them out,

one by one

and throw them at the street signs,

and shoot my pocketbook

into the Charles River.

Next I pull the dream off

and slam into the cement wall

of the clumsy calendar

I live in,

my life,

and its hauled up

notebooks.

The avant-garde musician Peter Gabriel used this Anne Sexton poem (and others) to capture the intensity of her introspective poetic vision in his song “Mercy Street” from his celebrated 1986 album simply title So.

The beautiful thing about poetry is that it is open to interpretation — multiple ones.  In this piece (“45 Mercy Street”), the poet seems to be searching for something lost in time: the house belonging to her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother.  The memory is strong, but the physical presence of the home that gave meaning to those memories is no more.  She feels lost — a stranger trying to recapture a time that was more innocent, a period in which the world was not yet adulterated by all of the problems that come with adulthood.  She longs to return.  She longs for mercy, maybe because her need for it at the time she wrote this piece was quite palpable.

The hunger for mercy.  The desire for comfort.  The longing for safety, for protection.

We all have that need.  Maybe we had it when we were little and wanted to return home, as Sexton did.  Life certainly gets more complicated the older you get.  There is a great quote from the Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life.  Jimmy Stewart’s character is talking to his future wife, played by Donna Reed, and an old man who happens to be watching them from his porch tells Jimmy Stewart to kiss her.  When he doesn’t, the old man says, “Oh, youth is wasted on the young.”  We know more, and we have more wisdom and insight the older we get, but all those aches and pains get in the way.  The body can no longer do what the mind desires.

Maybe we want the innocence of the past.  But maybe we want something else.  Maybe what we want is mercy.  That Peter Gabriel song I mentioned a moment ago (based on Anne Sexton and her work) has these lines as part of its chorus:

Dreaming of mercy

[I] Swear they moved that sign

Dreaming of mercy

In your daddy’s arms again

We cannot live in the past.  Being held in daddy’s (or mommy’s) arms is not possible for most of us, but we long for it.  We long to be held, comforted, and told that everything is going to be okay.  We want to hear that our wrongs have been made right, and that we are forgiven.

The truth is that God is our ultimate Father, and he provides such comfort and forgiveness all the time.  His arms are always open — wide open.  We are like the man in today’s Gospel lesson, the humble man who comes before God beating his chest and crying, “Have mercy on me, Lord, sinner that I am.”

Such humility is the place to begin.  Throughout the Scriptures, Jesus declares maxims such as, “those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”  To prostate oneself before God is where we need to be.  As Eliot once wrote — you knew that if I was going to talk about poetry, that ol’ Tom would make an appearance — Eliot once wrote, “The only wisdom we can hope to acquire is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.”[2]

Humility is the doorway to mercy.  Humility enables us to admit that we cannot fix ourselves (at least not the inner essence of ourselves) and that we need a Savior.  Jesus Christ, the one and only Son of God, is that Savior.  He embraces us at our best and our worst.  He comforts us when we hurt.  He forgives us when we sin.  He finds us when we are lost.  He loves us when we feel unloved.  That is mercy — mercy beyond compare.

We can search for it, like Anne Sexton.  We can sing about it, like Peter Gabriel.  In the end, though, it is right in front of us.  It is found in a favorite Bible verse.  It is evident in a beloved prayer.  It is found in the silence.  All you need to do is embrace it.  It is a gift that is free, and it is freeing.  Amen.

[1] Taken from Wikipedia.

[2] T.S. Eliot, “East Coker” (II), from Four Quartets.