The Awful Rowing Toward God

I was stamped out like a Plymouth fender

into this world....

but I grew, I grew,

and God was there like an island I had not rowed to ...

I am rowing, I am rowing

though the oarlocks stick and are rusty

and the sea blinks and rolls

like a worried eyeball,

but I am rowing, I am rowing,

though the wind pushes me back

and I know that that island will not be perfect,

it will have the flaws of life,

the absurdities of the dinner table,

but there will be a door

and I will open it

and I will get rid of the rat inside me,

the gnawing pestilential rat.

God will take it with his two hands

and embrace it.

From The Awful Rowing Toward God by Anne Sexton.


I'm still grappling with what the author means by this poem. But I do identify with the "gnawing pestilential rat" inside all of us, the evil part of us, that persistent, ever-bothersome rat. I understand, and I feel, the desire to get rid of it.

God is the only one who can take that rat away, and I look forward to the day when I will finally surrender it to him, and take on a restored, renewed me, with His name written on me, and with great rejoicing.