15 pages • 30 minutes read
The Expatriates
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Themes
Time & Loss
The poem’s preoccupation with loss reveals the thematic significance the transitory nature of a moment in time. The opening of the poem puts this theme on display, declaring in the first line, “it was a moment” (Line 1). Although the reader is unable to understand what “it” means, the loss of the moment feels important. Even while the moment was happening, Sexton describes it as a “moment / to clutch at for a moment” (Lines 1-2). The verb “clutch” evokes desperation, as if the moment itself contained the reason for its loss. A moment must exist briefly and then pass, and the poem communicates the transitory nature of time as a primary theme from its first stanza.
The third stanza reinforces the theme as it opens with a description of time: “For forty years this experimental / woodland grew” (Lines 12-13). The “forty years” evoke a human life lived until middle age. Regardless of specific connotations, the years the transplanted trees spent slowly growing, “their lives / filed out in exile” (Lines 15-16), mirrors the speaker’s years of alienation.
The poem’s conclusion advocates for a way to combat the loss of time. The speaker insists that the moment they experienced is now “butchered from time” (Line 31), so they “must tell of [it] quickly / before we lose the sound” (Lines 32-33). A moment cannot be recovered, but the belief in the moment has been preserved in the poem.
Identity & Authenticity
Sexton’s poem is largely structured around a central metaphor of the “misplanted Norwegian trees” (Line 7). The trees act as stand-ins for the central couple in the poem. The trees, like the people, are “The Expatriates” of the title, outsiders to the places they inhabit. The tension of their existence introduces questions of identity and authenticity. Just as the trees are not a proper “New England forest” (Line 6), but “misplanted Norwegian trees” (Line 7), the speaker and their beloved are, for an unknown reason, not a couple.
The inauthenticity of the misplanted trees is partly due to their growing “shaft by shaft in perfect rows” (Line 13). When the speaker imagines the natural setting, the poem implies that the speaker dreams of a forest as opposed to “a place of parallel trees” (Line 15). The neat precision of the trees makes them inauthentic—they were planted intentionally, not grown from nature. Similarly, the human figures in the poem appear to follow a preordained path. Though the moment the lovers shared in the woods is never fully expressed, the poem implies that the moment was sincere and authentic. Once the moment passes, they return to their lives, expatriated from their love and from the place where they can experience authentic moments.
Love & Solitude
“The Expatriates” is a poem communicated by a speaker who is alone as the moment the speaker spent with their beloved has passed. In this way, Sexton’s poem is reflects on both love and solitude, and how each feed into the other. While the first words of the poem address the speaker’s lover, the first and only appearance of the word “love” occurs near the end of the first stanza. Notably, the subject of the poem is not the couple’s love, but of the act of holding on to a moment spent together. The telling preserves the moment of love, as the speaker insists each “must tell of [it] quickly / before we lose [it]” (Lines 32-33).
The two lovers are together in the poem in the way the misplanted trees are together: growing in cold parallel lines, near but apart. The lovers sleep separately, thinking of the other in the solitude of their single beds. The earnest voice of the speaker insists that the “time, / butchered from time” (Lines 30-31) must be told “of quickly / before we lose the sound” (Lines 32-33); their love can exist only in the context of their memory of a shared moment. In this way, the love of the poem is dependent on the solitude of the speaker.
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