Ceilie's Essay #15

Ceilie Moore

Mr. Salsich

English 9

April 12th, 2009

Unseen Courage:

An Essay on a Poem 

Courage is often only seen in the heroes of the world. In the people who save lives every day, in the men who go into burning buildings to save the child stuck on the third floor and in the women who spend hours in an operating room, hunched over an unconscious body so their family can have many more years to spend with them. But what we don’t recognize is the true courage, the humble, unspoken courage. We don’t see the courage of the one soldier walking through a minefield to get to the other side, and the fearlessness of the five year-old walking away from his bully. (Antithesis)


In Anne Sexton’s poem, “Courage”, I see many themes, but one sticks out to me the most. In every stanza, I see Sexton subtly hinting at the fact that courage isn’t something that has to be shown off to be there. When people are courageous they often receive newspaper articles written about how heroic they are, or they are honored with a day named after them to remind everyone of their bravery. But courage doesn’t have to be shown off to be present, and I think that is what Sexton is trying to say in her poem. In two stanzas the theme is particularly present, one being the first stanza. In the first stanza, Sexton describes how courage can be exemplified (FAST) during one’s childhood. Sexton says, “When they called you crybaby or poor or fatty or crazy and made you into an alien, you drank their acid and concealed it.” What she means by this is that when a child is being teased by other kids, its easier for the victim to stand up for themselves and shoot the same words right back in their attackers’ faces, but what truly takes courage is the act of absorbing these hurtful words that sting like “acid” and walk away with any reaction. Sexton also demonstrates this theme in the second stanza. In this stanza, she is describing courage that is displayed on the battlefield during war and says, “You faced the death of bombs and bullets. You did not do it with a banner, you did it with only a hat to cover your heart.” She means that fighting as a soldier in a war takes immense amounts of courage for obvious reasons and to showboat your acts of bravery with a banner is understandable, having the humbleness to only honor yourself, the time you served and all of those you knew and didn’t know who died, with your hat over your heart requires even more courage than parading around with a banner. Courage is not the act of saying you did something without fear or hesitation, but the act of actually performing these brave acts and not feeling like you have to boast about your accomplishments.

Depression doesn’t really seem like an illness to most, in fact, a lot of people often just see it as an excuse for weakness. Depression is the state of being severely dejected (FAST), without any hope or feeling of suffiency. When someone is diagnosed with depression as a mental disorder, they have one setting, one mode, one emotion-sadness. Anne Sexton had a history of suffering from depression, and as weak as she probably felt, she dealt with it with a great amount of courage. After recognizing she had a problem, she went to see a therapist, who recommended she cope with her illness through poetry, which she did. Although she unfortunately committed suicide years later, she still displayed courage by fearlessly fighting against her opponent, and even though she eventually lost the battle, she tried, and trying takes courage. A few years ago, someone very close to me dealt with the same issue as Sexton. She was much younger than Sexton when she was diagnosed, and the situation got to the point where she was admitted into a hospital, where she lived for a few months constantly feeling sorrowful, and scared, and lonely, and tired of fighting to be happy. (Polysyndeton) She eventually gained the courage to get herself out of the situation, and after a lot of hard work and baby steps towards her goal, she broke through her wall of depression and came out triumphant. (Loose sentence) Reaching your goal is never easy, but when you’re fighting against yourself for your own life, you need every ounce of courage you can scrounge up to avoid drowning in your own sorrow.

We don’t see the everyday courage. We don’t recognize the courage walking off of the playground with such pain in his eyes, and that one courage out of thousands boarding the plane home after being in battle for the past twelve months. We only see the obvious courage, the courage that receives medals and badges in the honor of their bravery. Courage lies beneath every single one of us, and it doesn’t take a certificate to prove it’s real.