Anne Sexton, “Rowing,” from The Awful Rowing Toward God, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1975†   It is tedious to discuss how and why Anne Sexton is enshrined (entrapped) by the label confessional. Let us acknowledge that “confession” also means a declaration of faith, as Augustine reminds us in his conversion narrative, Confessions. Sexton hoped to awaken her readers spiritually, and she prophesied her poetry would be seen as mystical. Her spiritual adviser, a priest, once told her, “God is in your typewriter.” Her last and finest book, The Awful Rowing Toward God, offers an inclusio presenting God as an island to whom Sexton rows. I would like to consider the opening poem, “Rowing,” as an example of radically condensed classical structure with both expected and surprising…