All My Pretty Ones

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the various items she encounters bring about mixed feelings.
The attitude of "All My Pretty Ones" alters because of the shift in events. Since the events vary from stanza to stanza, the tone of the poem adjusts along with each event. In the first stanza, the speaker grieves over the deaths of her parents. Experiencing the loss of both parents causes the speaker to be mournful. She comes across all of the items that her father has left behind. The first stanza tells of the speaker's final decision to throw away her father's belongings after his death, so as to free her father from "the tangles of his now past life" (Barth). Then, she encounters a photo album. As she goes through the album, she sees many unfamiliar faces. In the second stanza, the speaker realizes that she will never know any of the unfamiliar people in her father's photographs. She will "never know what these faces are all about" because the one person who could have told her is now gone (Sexton). This ...

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changes from reminiscent to forgiving and loving.
The second reason the attitude changes from stanza to stanza is that the speaker experiences the five stages of grief: isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance/forgiveness (Kubler-Ross). In the first stanza, the speaker experiences the first stage of grief: denial and isolation. The speaker starts by calling the tragedy a "jinx" and claiming her mother to be in a "cold slumber" instead of facing the matter and calling it death. She then says that they have left her "here to shuffle and disencumber" (Sexton 4), meaning that she is now on this earth alone and isolated. The second stanza may show that the speaker feels ...

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