Sharing the Joy

After the soul's dark night comes the radiance of morning. Join the celebration with poet Anne Sexton and painter Mary Pratt.

In Mary Pratt’s “Between the Dark and the Daylight.” the day’s first meal is a devotion.

Pull up a chair at my kitchen table. I’ve just made sourdough toast. The coffee’s hot, scrambled eggs with cheddar and chives are coming up. There’s nothing like breakfast to redeem a bad night, and I figure we’ve both had a few of those lately.

My friends have been expecting you. Mary Pratt, the Canadian photorealist who whose domestic still lives glow like stained-glass windows. Anne Sexton, the self-proclaimed “possessed witch” of confessional poetry—renowned for the torment that drove her to suicide at 45, but sustained until then by her capacity for joy. Mary’s luminous painting of coffee and toast channels Anne’s “Welcome Morning,” hymn of praise to the rituals of waking up in the fullest sense—to pleasure, to nature, to communion with a power beyond herself. She didn’t follow any organized religion, even called herself an atheist, yet in her kitchen she had a close encounter with God. See how she lets the hosannas rip:

Welcome Morning

There is joy

in all:

in the hair I brush each morning,

in the Cannon towel, newly washed,

that I rub my body with each morning,

in the chapel of eggs I cook

each morning,

in the outcry from the kettle

that heats my coffee

each morning,

in the spoon and the chair

that cry “hello there, Anne”

each morning,

in the godhead of the table

that I set my silver, plate, cup upon

each morning.

All this is God,

right here in my pea-green house

each morning

and I mean,

though often forget,

to give thanks,

to faint down by the kitchen table

in a prayer of rejoicing

as the holy birds at the kitchen window

peck into their marriage of seeds.

So while I think of it,

let me paint a thank-you on my palm

for this God, this laughter of the morning,

lest it go unspoken.

The Joy that isn’t shared, I’ve heard,

dies young.

“The godhead of the table.” Mary saw it too, in her fashion. I know nothing of her spiritual beliefs, yet her still life pulses with spirit in the sacred sense of the word, “a divine animating influence or inspiration.” Light illuminates every crumb and cranny of the toast. It casts a sheen on the plate, turns a plastic toast rack into a devotional object. (Anne’s “chapel of eggs” would fit right in.) The knife gleams, its handle angled toward you like an invitation. The scene shimmers with intimacy, a single place set for you and the light. Or Mary and the light, but that’s a detail. It’s all one, fused by light.

Anne’s poem also celebrates the solitary moment—a bright succession of them, from the hairbrush and the towel to the setting of the table and birds at the window. The house is all hers and yet the place is anything but quiet. It’s a veritable choir of praise—the kettle making its “outcry,” the poet’s ecstatic prayer (just shy of speaking in tongues), the sweetly whimsical greeting from the spoon and chair, leavening the full-tilt ecstasy. I’ve heard charismatic Christians speak of being “slain in the spirit” (otherwise known as holy rolling) but the poet’s control of her diction brings a sense of order to the scene. The repeated “each morning” suggests the refrain in a fine old hymn.

After a good many readings, I noticed how Anne punctuates the title—no comma between “welcome” and “morning.” She’s not welcoming the morning but asking you—and all of us—to welcome it with her, raising our voices in a clamor of jubilation. Joy must be shared, she tells us, or it dies young. Notice the words “I’ve heard,” dropped in as an aside yet freighted with meaning. This sharing of joy is not her own idea; she picked it up from someone. Joy is everywhere, like the light in Mary’s painting—both a gift and a responsibility. All we have to do is keep it shining. There’s a catch: forgetfulness. And so Anne paints a reminder on her palm.

Once long ago in a fever dream, I heard God speak in a ringing baritone. I couldn’t make out the words, only the meter, iambic pentameter. I believe in John Donne’s Holy Sonnets. God, not so much. I’m not sure I want to believe in a God who could let this world careen ever deeper into terror, hatred and destruction. But I’m not arrogant enough to say that God does not exist. Now more than ever, I need to keep a space for belief—not just in one percent of myself but in every cell of my being.

When I floundered in a 12-Step group because I couldn’t turn my life and my will over to the care of God as I understood Him, a sister member urged me not to be so literal. Forget the old patriarch in the sky, she told me. I could define God any way I wanted. God is love, it’s often said. I like Anne Sexton’s implied definition: God is joy with a capital J. Anne named her younger daughter Joy. After Joy’s birth, her chronic mental illness flared, landing her in a mental hospital. Yet she wrote on, enraptured by the chime and clang and snap of one true line against another. A priest would later tell her, “God is in your typewriter.”

“Welcome Morning” appeared in her last book, published posthumously in 1975. She called it The Awful Rowing Toward God. “Awful” as in bad as bad can be, but also as in full of awe. Unbeliever that she was, she found the deity real enough to seek in spite of her mounting disgust with herself and the evils of the world. There are poems in this book as unrelentingly dark as any I have read. The Holocaust tormented Anne. God hadn’t stopped it.

Belief comes easily to zealots—in God, Hitler, MAGA or anything else. As Yeats warned in another alarming time, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity.” The kindling of conviction is slow, essential work. It keeps me on the hunt for amazement—on my morning dog walk, in the stories I’ve been blessed to live for more than 70 years, in the art and poetry that ground me. Anne died young but her joy endures. Reading “Welcome Morning” with my Sunday coffee, I share her thrill at landing the line about those birds with their “marriage of seeds.” I’m not sure precisely what she meant but I’ll choose wonder over knowing any day. It’s my privilege to serve you this bounty.

Pass it on.

And now, friends, over to you. Whatever you’ve got to say about poetry, God or anything else, I’m listening.

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Many of Anne Sexton’s great poems can be found online. And don’t miss Erica Jong’s brief, beautiful essay for The New York Times on Anne as mentor and friend

I turn often to The Complete Poems: Anne Sexton (Harper Collins). Also recommended: Anne Sexton: a Self-Portrait in Letters, edited by her daughter Linda Gray Sexton (Houghton Mifflin); and Anne Sexton: a Biography by Diane Wood Middlebrook; and Linda Gray Sexton’s memoir Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton.

As for Mary Pratt, I’ve heard only good things about Annie Koval’s new book Mary Pratt: a Love Affair with Vision (Goose Lane Editions).