Sexton’s recitation of the first stanza of “Venus and the Ark” was dull. Her tone was monotonic, and she spoke through each word with rapid succession. The purpose of the monotonic voice was to convey her attitude towards science related events; she thought science related events such as sending 2 PhDs to Venus was boring and uneventful. Sexton’s monotonic voice makes her audience drift off in thought, not paying attention to the poem. I think she speaks monotonically and with rapid succession on purpose in order for her listeners to not care about details such as the “one hundred carefully counted insects, three almost new snakes, coiled in a cube, exactly fifty fish creatures…” (5-9) Not wanting her listeners to care for such details may suggests the idea that specific counts of life is useless or mocks the precision of science.
Then throughout of the poem, she added more “pauses” between each word, and her tone was less monotonic, and more saddened. The increase of “pauses” between words allowed her listeners to get more detail of each and single words, showing importance of the man’s destruction on Earth and the restart of nature on another planet. Sexton wanted to get her idea of man’s dystopia and a chance of a restart across to her audience later in the poem.
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