The Expatriates

Sexton opens “The Expatriates” with an intimate address: “My dear” (Line 1). This address both grounds the poem in a context of a lover’s speech to a beloved and disarms the reader, inviting the reader to understand the poem as an intimate love letter addressed to the reader.

After this first phrase, Sexton splits the line with a comma, which is a technique known as a caesura, or, a musical rest in the middle of a poetic line. The phrase following the address specifies that “it was a moment” (Line 1), without elaborating on the meaning of the pronoun “it” and drawing attention to the brevity of the “moment.” The following line repeats the word “moment”: “to clutch at for a moment” (Line 2). This repetition further emphasizes the specificity of the poem as a whole, without providing the reader with a picture of to what exactly this specificity refers.

The first stanza continues to emphasize the specificity of the moment without yet informing the reader about what “it” (Lines 4, 5) may be. The ambiguity propels the reader forward in the poem, inviting the reader to seek answers; it also clears a space for the reader to fill with the reader’s own intimate and personal experiences. In this way, the stanza maintains its specificity to the poet while inviting the reader to personalize the poem.

In addition to these subtleties of specificity and universality, the first stanza also introduces themes of time and loss. A moment exists only “to clutch at for a moment” (Line 2), suggesting that a moment exists not just on its own, but in relationship with the person who experiences it. An individual must grasp a moment “so that you may believe in it” (Line 3). This grasping is “the act of love” (Line 4), an act that revitalizes the love by communicating it to another person, as the poem does to the reader.

The poem’s second stanza is a counterpoint to the subtle nuance of the first stanza, filled with concrete details and imagery. The speaker reveals that the undefined “it” that “was a moment” (Line 1) takes place “[i]n the false New England forest” (Line 6). The word “false” (Line 6) announces a tension in the poem. Though the phrase makes more concrete sense once the poem explains that the forest is full of “misplanted Norwegian trees” (Line 7), the stanza maintains its more abstract tensions as well. Though these transplants “refused to root” (Line 8) in the poem, the stanza goes on to describe their roots as “synthetic” (Line 8), hinting at an artificiality that becomes more important later in the poem.

In the second half of the second stanza, the realism begins to break down. The roots of the expatriate trees “barg[e] out of the dirt to work on the air” (Line 9), and the speaker and their beloved “held hands and walked on our knees” (Line 10). The people and the roots seem to swap positions, the former lowering themselves to their knees while the latter rise up above the ground. This reversal follows a structural logic in the stanza, where the unsettling strangeness of the forest’s “fals[ity]” (Line 6) finally blooms beyond the bounds of realism constraining it in lines 9 and 10. Eventually, the poem’s progression pauses with a statement: “Actually, there was no one there” (Line 11). This statement tempers the earlier slip into absurdity and emphasizes the image as an empty one that signifies loss. Just like the image is empty, so is the moment gone, “wherever it went” (Line 5).

The third stanza returns to a description of scene more grounded in realism. The “experimental” (Line 12) forest of transplants materializes into an orchard or nursery, as the trees grow “in perfect rows” (Line 13). The forest again becomes a synthetic entity, a “place of parallel trees” (Line 15). Sexton portrays this man-made arboreal experiment as something eerie, where the trees “filed out [their lives] in exile” (Line 16). Making use of a classic literary device known as the pathetic fallacy, the speaker suggests that the lonely exile of the trees is also an experience of the speaker and their beloved. In the forest, they walk “too alien to know / our sameness” (Lines 16, 17), alienated to themselves just as the trees are aliens to the soil in which they grow.

The final line of the stanza makes liberal use of ambiguity. The speaker makes deliberate use of grammatical ambiguity to incorporate multiple and layered meanings into the poem. The speaker and their companion are “too alien to know / [their] sameness and how [it] survives” (Lines 16, 17), but the meaning of “sameness” is elusive. It is possible that the lovers share features of their identities with the exiled inhabitants of the orchard. The sameness could be a sameness that the trees share, which only belongs to the speaker insofar as the forest belongs to those who walk there, even if for only “a moment” (Lines 1, 17). Alternatively, this sameness could be a similarity shared between the speaker and their beloved. This ambiguity of meaning creates a feeling in the reader similar to the feelings the walkers in the forest experience; these moments are full of significance but “alien” (Line 17) and eerie. The question of “how [this] sameness survives” (Line 17), then, concerns the survival of the forest and of the human beings involved in this moment.

The fourth stanza introduces a “village” (Line 18) from which “cars / followed” (Lines 18-19). The speaker describes the path as a “white line” (Line 19). This detail, along with “stub branches” (Line 14) from the previous stanza, illustrates a winter forest scene where the speaker walked with their beloved “two [days] before” (Line 20). The relationship at the crux of the poem, about which the reader has been told very little, is complicated by the fact that its members sleep in two “single beds” (Line 20). The poem further emphasizes the bleakness of the setting by saying “the woods were caught / in their dying” (Lines 22, 23), mirroring the grim feelings of the couple whose love is in question.

The penultimate stanza initiates a turn in the poem. Even in its first phrase, the speaker moves away from the moment from the past and into the present, where the speaker “now must dream” (Line 24). For the speaker, the present time takes the form of a dream borne out of the moment with which the poem is concerned. The speaker must confront their reality, apart from their lover. Only memory and imagination allow the speaker to be back in the forest with their lover.

The final stanza returns to the form and topic of the first stanza, echoing the structure of the opening couplet. The moment—the “time, / butchered from time” (Lines 30-31)—has a new urgency. Instead of wondering “wherever [the moment] went” (Line 5), the speaker now urges their beloved to “tell of [the moment] quickly / before we lose” (Lines 32-33) what it is they experienced. Although the trees do not belong to the ground in which they grow, and the lovers do not belong away from their homes in the New England forest, the speaker summarizes the power of the moment as evident in the two “mouths calling mine, mine, mine” (Line 34). The power and beauty of the walk in the forest exists in the moment at which they believe that they are home for each other. This belief “is the act of love” (Line 3), no matter how fleeting.