The speaker of Anne Sexton 's poem "Mr. Mine" is a woman, as tacitly revealed by the speaker at the beginning of the poem when she asks her audience to "Notice how he has numbered the blue veins / in [her] breast" ("Mr. Mine" 1-2). The poem essentially serves as an extended metaphor in which the speaker describes her male lover, depicting him as an "industrialist" ("Mr. Mine" 5) who was responsible for creating her, a living "city of flesh" ("Mr. Mine" 4). The speaker sustains the metaphor throughout the entire poem, highlighting how her actions stimulated him to enhance her: "The time I was dancing he built a museum. / He built ten blocks when I moved on the bed. / He constructed an overpass when I left. / I gave him flowers and he built an
…show more content…
Because the poem does not rhyme, the audience is being prompted to focus primarily on the starting and ending words of the end-stopped line. The effectiveness of the end-stop in engrossing the audience is best manifested by the line "He is building a city, a city of flesh." ("Mr. Mine" 4). The word "flesh" has a grotesque connotation, drawing attention to itself and provoking the audience to infer a deeper meaning. The word, literatim, means "the physical body and not the mind or the soul" ("Flesh"), evincing how removed the speaker is from her immaterial self as a repercussion of her dependency on her lover for importance.Th e repetition of the phrase "Now he goes" ("Mr. Mine" 3) stresses how he was not passive in his process of creating her, articulating how by being active in her construction, she was made more active. The speaker spotlights the soft-sounding word "from" by repeating it in a parallel line structure, an example of anaphora: "From the glory of words he has built me up. / From the wonder of concrete he has molded me." ("Mr. Mine" 10-11). This evokes the audience to perceive how she views her lover as god-like, how he used his abilities with words and symbolic concrete to influence her growth. In this poem, the diction "from" insinuates being drawn from another person, further magnifying how the speaker understood her lover to be a powerful and
Because the poem does not rhyme, the audience is being prompted to focus primarily on the starting and ending words of the end-stopped line. The effectiveness of the end-stop in engrossing the audience is best manifested by the line "He is building a city, a city of flesh." ("Mr. Mine" 4). The word "flesh" has a grotesque connotation, drawing attention to itself and provoking the audience to infer a deeper meaning. The word, literatim, means "the physical body and not the mind or the soul" ("Flesh"), evincing how removed the speaker is from her immaterial self as a repercussion of her dependency on her lover for importance.Th e repetition of the phrase "Now he goes" ("Mr. Mine" 3) stresses how he was not passive in his process of creating her, articulating how by being active in her construction, she was made more active. The speaker spotlights the soft-sounding word "from" by repeating it in a parallel line structure, an example of anaphora: "From the glory of words he has built me up. / From the wonder of concrete he has molded me." ("Mr. Mine" 10-11). This evokes the audience to perceive how she views her lover as god-like, how he used his abilities with words and symbolic concrete to influence her growth. In this poem, the diction "from" insinuates being drawn from another person, further magnifying how the speaker understood her lover to be a powerful and