The poem, “Music Swims Back to Me,” consists of three free verse paragraphs. Like most of Anne Sexton’s poetry, this one belongs to the confessional style, which focuses on the intimate personal experience of the poet’s life. Sexton began writing at the behest of her psychotherapist as a way of refocusing her suicidal tendencies to give her a reason to live.
Because Sexton did spend time in mental institutions, this poem, no doubt, expresses her actual experience, at least to a point. The poets of confession employ poetics in their craft, even though they are expressing their real experience. Their speakers must be evaluated as independent speakers of their poems, just as the speakers of other styles of poems are understood.
First Verse Paragraph: “Wait Mister. Which way is home”
The first line of this poem indicates a confused personality; she is institutionalized, yet she asks some unidentified “Mister,” “Which way is home?” She then immediately begins to describe the eerie details of her surroundings: things seem to move in a dark corner, the room has “no sign posts,” there are four diaper-wearing ladies over eighty-years-old.
The speaker then introduces the refrain and poem title as he makes it clear that she has been involuntarily placed in a mental facility: “La la la, Oh music swims back to me / and I can feel the tune they played / the night they left me / in this private institution on a hill.”
Second Verse Paragraph: “Imagine it. A radio playing”
The speaker commands her listener/reader to “Imagine it.” She is referring to the music from a radio and adds that all the inmates of the institution “are crazy.” She reports that she was glad to be admitted, and she showed her joy by “danc[ing] in a circle.”
The speaker then reports the observation that music sparks the memory; by associating the tune she heard when something in her past happened, she can recall the events. Thus, she claims that the music “remembers better.”
The music helps her remember her first night in the institution when “It was the strangled cold of November; / even the stars were strapped in the sky / and that moon too bright / forking through the bars to stick me / with a singing in the head.” She fought incarceration at first and had to be “strapped” down; she remembers seeing the moon shining through the bars on the windows.
Because of the music that was recorded by her brain, she remembers those specific details, but she has “forgotten all the rest.”
Third Verse Paragraph: “They lock me in this chair at eight a.m.”
The speaker reports that every morning at 8:00 the hospital workers place her in a chair where she must remain, and she remains confused because “there are no signs to tell the way.” She has no place to put her mind or body. She does not know what to do or where to go. She is not aware that she has nowhere to go and no need to.
Still the music from the radio continues to “beat[ ] to itself / and the song that remembers” more than she does. It takes her back again—it is swimming back to her again—reminding her of that first night when she “danced a circle / and was not afraid.” Once again, she addresses, “Mister?”—questioning where she is supposed to go, but this time without the words.
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