All My Pretty Ones By Anne Sexton Summary

Conflict can take many forms and is commonplace in the world today. Some forms include verbal, physical, emotional, internal, and external. Another common form of conflict is between adults and children. This type of conflict is present in many literary works such as All My Pretty Ones by Anne Sexton. In this poem, the author is dealing with the death of her parents, especially that of her father. As a result, old memories surface and the author is forced to address the conflicts she had with her father.
In this poem, the narrator is left to sort through her father’s things since he recently died. While sorting through his things, she is able to release the anguish she felt toward her father and address some conflicts the two of them had. The lines, “leaving me here to shuffle and disencumber you from the residence you could not afford… boxes of pictures of people I do not know. I touch their cardboard faces. They must go.” Portray the speaker’s discomfort as she looks through her father’s belongings and discovers things about his past which she had no previous knowledge of. The aforementioned

This can be seen in the lines, “a small boy waits in a ruffled dress… this soldier who holds his bugle like a toy or for this velvet lady who cannot smily. Is this your father’s father, this commodore in a mailman suit?” As she is looking through the pictures her father had, she is realizing that she has no idea who some of the people are and now will never know. After this realization, the tone turns to one that is more agitated and hurt. In the lines, “Now I fold you down, my drunkard, my navigator, my first lost keeper, to love or look at later. I hold a five-year diary that my mother kept for three years, telling all she does not say of your alcoholic tendency.” These lines reveal that her father’s drinking habits ruined his relationships and the speaker dislikes him because of