# data[].attributes.body
"Ms. Dog," like "Anne" in earlier sections, is represented in the third person and thereby emphatically dissociated from the original speaker, indeed, the speaker is not certain who this performing subject is, hence: "Who's that at the podium?" This emphasizes the autonomy of the public persona

# data[].attributes.body
Sexton is explicit about the connection between money (the green paper) and poetry (in particular the performed poem, or "song"). Indeed, she confesses: "I wish I were the U.S. Mint, / turning it all out." The metaphor of "turning it out," particularly with its aural pun on "churning," indicates that confession is not, after all, some sacred calling or irrepressible release. It is a fabrication, a "made" or manufactured product of American consumer society.

# data[].attributes.body
In the second stanza of section two, Sexton's speaker adopts a further dramatic role; that of "Ms. Dog." Caroline Hall speculates that "Ms. Dog" is inspired by Eliot's waste land dog (47) and although this is one possible influence, we should also note that Sexton had likened herself to a dog (servile, inhuman) on a number of other occasions.

# data[].attributes.body
The rhetoric here becomes defensive, as though anticipating criticism of such self display and testing the limits of confessional discourse. How far can the speaker go before the audience ("executioner"/Eliot?) tires of her? How "personal" can she be?The metaphor of undressing invokes contemporary hostility against confessional self-revelation, or the "unbuttoned style of reminiscence," as Jonathan Raban has termed it. (45) "Tom" is, of course, Thomas Stearns Eliot, here addressed with more familiarity, and more contempt, than the apostrophe "Mr. Eliot" in Sexton's "Sweeney."

# data[].attributes.body
She has been living with company of death for long that her heart is being mutilated so deeply. She is no longer able to look upon things as it is with her suffering heart. She observes the world through the veil of obscenity. She tries to overcome this outright lie by covering her naked mind. She reaches a point where she wonders if life is some kind of act, which no one wants to act in.  Probing further into life she finds a silver lining of hope. She is able to find an answer in the chaos like a dream a perfect life with a perfect family, but even they take her love for granted and make her just an instrument in their life.

# data[].attributes.body
The poem is an intensely female experience, with a strong and powerful voice. The first line of the poem clearly describes her unusually honest approach towards poetry, and her forthright, unflinching focus on feminist themes and human body.

# data[].attributes.body
The poet repeated the same word god at the end of some neighboring stanzas. The poetic device is a kind of epiphora.

# data[].attributes.body
The confessional poet, like the Sibyl of Cumae, is caught and objectified by the gaze of her audience and resorts to what seems to be the only comprehensible language--the language of the body. Here, in "Hurry Up Please," the private self is put on public display. The gesture mocks the self-exposure of confessional writing, developed subsequently in this poem, and elsewhere, in metaphors of sexual display and prostitution, and treats the corrupting business of poetry with contempt. (41) The dual meaning of "Nirvana" conflates the spiritual and the vulgar (common, popular) promise of confessionalism.

# data[].attributes.body
The speaker in "Hurry Up Please," too, is caught between life and death. She is tormented by the scrutiny of her audience (the "executioners" and "interrogator" in Sexton's poem, the young boys in Eliot's epigraph). That she is displayed like an anatomical specimen in a glass bottle replicates the metaphor of the inverted glass bowl which is central to another Sexton poem, "For John, Who Begs Me Not to Enquire Further." It also replicates Sylvia Plath's image of the "Bell Jar." (40) In each case, the glass jar signifies the control and public display of the female subject.

# data[].attributes.body
Indeed, the opening couplet of "Hurry Up Please It's Time" is most significant in respect of its subtle allusion to the Sibyl of Cumae--the subject of Eliot's epigraph to The Waste Land. His epigraph refers to the mythological story of the Sibyl who, granted a wish by Apollo, asked for prolonged life, but neglected to ask for continued youthfulness.

# data[].attributes.body
The dialogue with the "Interrogator" permits Sexton both to make reassuring points about the therapeutic promise of confession ("one day is enough to perfect a man" [my emphasis]) and to exercise the voice of cynicism or doubt; the voice, indeed, of a Jonah. For Anne's response ("I watered and fed the plant") alludes to the Biblical parable wherein God proves his power to a doubting Jonah by creating and then destroying a great plant (Jonah 4.6-11). The Biblical allusion is important, too, because it reiterates the death wish of the poem's opening lines. Jonah in the Bible, like the poem's opening speaker, is tormented by his longing for death, complaining bitterly: "it is better for me to die than to live" (Jonah 4.3)

# data[].attributes.body
This scripted exchange serves to unsettle our sense of the identity of the speaker of the poem (the "I" with which it opened) and of the relationship between "I" and "Anne" and the poet "Anne Sexton." The presence of these multiple characters also serves to confirm the dramatic or theatrical nature of confession, which may not be a "true" reflection of lived experience, but a staged spectacle.

# data[].attributes.body
The implied dialogue with which "Hurry Up Please" opens is made explicit at the end of the first section with the emergence of an "Interrogator." This may represent a religious or psychiatric confessor, hence the reference to "seven days," which connotes the weekly rite of confession to the priest or weekly therapeutic hour. The interrogator's role is to question "Anne":

# data[].attributes.body
The speaker asks a question--of the reader, Eliot, a therapist, a spiritual advisor, God?--but is unable to command a response. The inability or refusal of the addressee to offer any answers signifies a general loss of faith in the power of religion, or of the secular religion of psychotherapy, neither of which can provide the satisfaction which they had once seemed to promise.

# data[].attributes.body
Sexton's lines also make explicit the ontological questions ("What is death, I ask. / What is life, you ask.") that remain merely implicit in Eliot's poem, and foreground the quest framework which underpins both texts. The insistence and juxtaposition of the opening antitheses ("death" and "life") invite us to anticipate a further one. We expect to find the verb "ask" completed with "answer" ("I ask. / [...] you answer") and we are disconcerted when we realize, particularly at such an early stage, that there may not be any answers. This introduces a primary uncertainty, one which persists throughout, and even motivates, the whole poem

# data[].attributes.body
The first two lines of "Hurry Up Please" foreground the dialogic or discursive nature of confessional poetry; the fact that, as Michel Foucault and Leigh Gilmore have argued, in order that the confession be realized, there must be an "I" and a "you," a speaker and a reader, a penitent and a confessor.

# data[].attributes.body
"Hurry Up Please" combines the popular, the contemporary, the emphatically and purposefully American, as for example in section two: "Peanut butter is the American food / We all eat it, being patriotic," with the spiritual and transcendent. It posits that the American dream (the "Holy Grail" of domestic bliss) is in fact a nightmare, hence the lament: "Milk is the American drink. / Oh queen of sorrows." Sexton returns to this theme later in the poem where references to "jello," "milk," "juice," and "peanut butter" again identify America with consumption and thus inevitably with expulsion--a process which is represented throughout the poem by scatological metaphors:

# data[].attributes.body
Sexton's poem juxtaposes the intense and mystical and the superficial and mocking, hence the refrain "La de dah" which mimics Eliot's "Weialala leia / Wallala leialala" and in so doing subverts its serious and incantatory potential. Indeed, Sexton's line parodies the presumptuous erudition of Eliot's phrase, mimicking its intonation and transforming it into a slang reference to snobbery. (34)

# data[].attributes.body
Sexton's poem refers to the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, to the Sibyls of classical mythology, and to Buddhist texts. Like Eliot's "The Hollow Men," her poem inserts incomplete fragments of prayer or Gospel, borrowing a line from the Book of Common Prayer ("Forgive us, Father, for we know not") which is, itself, a borrowing from the Gospels ("Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do" [Luke 23.34]).

# data[].attributes.body
As in The Waste Land, the idiom changes repeatedly throughout the poem: from the simple and childlike (the appeal to the mother in section four, and the nursery rhyme rhythms and allusions throughout) to the learned and contemplative: "learning to talk is a complex business." The narration shifts tenses, moving from the present ("This is the rainy season") to the past ("Once upon a time we were all born") to anticipation of the future ("One noon as you walk out to the mailbox / He'll snatch you up")

# data[].attributes.body
As in The Waste Land, the idiom changes repeatedly throughout the poem: from the simple and childlike (the appeal to the mother in section four, and the nursery rhyme rhythms and allusions throughout) to the learned and contemplative: "learning to talk is a complex business." The narration shifts tenses, moving from the present ("This is the rainy season") to the past ("Once upon a time we were all born") to anticipation of the future ("One noon as you walk out to the mailbox / He'll snatch you up")

# data[].attributes.body
Sexton's poem dramatizes an urgent--hence the title--quest, not just for an answer to the questions posed in the opening lines ("What is death, I ask. / What is life, you ask") but for an appropriate discourse in which to contemplate them

# data[].attributes.body
It is impossible to overstate the importance of "Hurry Up Please" to an understanding of Sexton's work. It functions as a manifesto of her poetics, it provides a resume of many of the concerns of earlier poems, and it invokes and challenges the terms of the assumed dichotomy between Sexton's "personal" poetry and Eliot's impersonalism.

# data[].attributes.body
The poem offers a sustained explication and defense of personal writing by addressing and refuting limited and limiting perceptions of confessionalism, and by confidently engaging with Eliot's influential thought and practice.

# data[].attributes.body
It is in "Hurry Up Please It's Time," however, that Sexton's contemplation and negotiation of Eliot's writing are most fully realized. The poem enters into a critical dialogue with Eliot's The Waste Land, making sophisticated and purposive use of multiple personae, self-reflexively contemplating questions about memory, language, and subjectivity, and juxtaposing private introspection and public display. It raises questions about spirituality and secularization, innocence and experience, male and female identity, and, ultimately, about life and death.

# data[].attributes.body
her poem "O Ye Tongues" considers the same problem of origins as Eliot's "East Coker." It also, like his "Burnt Norton," debates the limitations and failures of language.

# data[].attributes.headline
Perez, Ashley Hope. "Anne Sexton in search of 'an Accident of Hope'." New England Review, vol. 34, no. 1, 2013, p. 20+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A337721287/GPS?u=j243905&sid=GPS&xid=2ca0769e. Accessed 3 Jan. 2018.

# data[].attributes.subject
Perez, Ashley Hope. "Anne Sexton in search of 'an Accident of Hope'." New England Review, vol. 34, no. 1, 2013, p. 20+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A337721287/GPS?u=j243905&sid=GPS&xid=2ca0769e. Accessed 3 Jan. 2018.

# data[].attributes.body
As much as Sexton's family and friends might have liked to construe "Live" as a sign that she had finally chosen life over death once and for all, the cry of "Live, Live " belongs to the poem's persona, not to the poet herself.

# data[].attributes.body
the final poem, "Live," ended the book on a positive, life-affirming note. For some this was too obvious or programmatic an ending; others complained that the finale lacked the polish of the earlier poems in the collection

# data[].attributes.body
The writing of "For John, Who Begs Me Not to Enquire Further" was a kind of assertion of independence, but Sexton was not turning her back on the growth she had experienced in Holmes's workshop

# data[].attributes.body
The eloquence and earnestness of her defense demonstrated to Holmes that she had a mission for her poetry; she was after much more than a messy and imagistic purge of emotion

# data[].attributes.body
Between "my kitchen" and "your kitchen," "my face" and "your face," there is only a single breath, the hair's width of a comma. For Sexton saw her poems not as mere release, but as efforts towards connection.

# data[].attributes.body
As real as this veil might be, in the final lines of "For John" Sexton captures the intense, unmediated intimacy that might be possible if the veil could drop:

# data[].attributes.body
Still, Sexton understood Holmes's fear of the exposure of private demons, a fear she described in the poem as "an invisible veil between us all."

# data[].attributes.body
"For John" is conciliatory in tone rather than confrontational, and it demonstrates a maturity that likely took Holmes by surprise.

# data[].attributes.body
In "For John, Who Begs Me Not to Enquire Further," a poem Sexton sent privately to Holmes, she responded to his objections to her style and choice of subject.

# data[].attributes.body
In a description of The Death Notebooks , the last collection published before her suicide, Sexton defines several of the key features of her own poetry: "the poems will be very Sexton ... intense, personal, perhaps religious in places.

# data[].attributes.body
While her writing may not have been evidence of schizophrenia, it often did hinge on farming her unconscious for associations, images, and metaphors

# data[].attributes.body
She was in constant search of closeness and security in her relationships, yet she harbored terrible fears of public interactions: "Somebody sees me, and I see myself through them. Then it's all gone, the whole world falls apart."

# data[].attributes.body
That Sexton suffered from insecurity and doubt about the originality of her work is no wonder:

# data[].attributes.body
The writing in Anne Sexton's few journals reveals the eternal nay-saying of the internal critic. "I am too dramatic," she lamented, wishing instead to take "words in hand and speak out in unprecedented honesty."