Mercy Street

Reading these comments has been a fascinating journey. I'd read little or none of Sexton's poetry beforehand, and I'd made casual attempts to understand lines of this song as I heard it play. It was a revelation to find that it was based on her life, and to begin to look into them.

There is a major piece of the puzzling missing in the comments so far: While Sexton wrote a poem called "45 Mercy Street" and Gabriel's lyrics obviously refer to it, there was also a play that Sexton wrote called "Mercy Street" (identical to Gabriel's song) and nobody has so far mentioned it.

The play is set in a hospital during the Civil War, and the female lead is named Mary who begins a relationship with a doctor named Jed. Given that Gabriel's lyrics have the same title, refer to a hospital, and mention a Mary, that's likely the Sexton work most relevant to the lyrics – though they aren't the only work; again, "45 Mercy Street" is certainly relevant.

A third Sexton work almost certainly key to understanding the lyrics is her poem, published posthumously, "Rowing Towards God." This poem uses a boat voyage towards an island as a metaphor for death, and it was among her final works before she committed suicide.

Given this (but now, we see, we could do a masters degree in literature trying to break all of this down), I'd explain the poem this way:

As an adult, Sexton, as recounted in "45 Mercy Street," searched the neighborhood of her childhood, trying to find her former house. Her search for the physical house failed, as did her spiritual search for something peaceful and calming to orient her. Her present life offers her psychological torment, and she can only dream of mercy – for someone to show her mercy is what she needs and will not receive. Ambiguously, she dreams of mercy and being in her father's arms again as she was as a girl, but Sexton's memories of being in her father's arms are not of mercy but abuse. This is something the song alone wouldn't convey to someone who didn't know Sexton's story.

When Gabriel mentions the corridors of pale green and gray, he may be referring both to the hospital in the play "Mercy Street" and the places where Sexton received psychological treatment. Of course, Gabriel aside, we might ask why she used such similar titles for two of her works with, on the surface, different settings, and it seems like a good guess that she is using the physical horrors of a war hospital as a metaphor for the psychological horrors of her condition (just as her physical search for a house was also a spiritual search for "mercy" – "looking for mercy… Mercy Street"), and Gabriel is probably playing both sides of that ambiguity as well. The "Mary" in the lyrics, mentioned along with a hospital, is probably the one from the play, who is kissed by Jed, and this Mary is probably an avatar for Sexton herself, not the Virgin Mary (as in "The Kiss") nor Sexton's mother.

Finally, taking the boat out "on the sea" is Anne's suicide, and she is "with her father" in the sense that he preceded her in death and that the abuse that Anne remembers was one horrible part of the tormented life that led Anne to take that final journey.

I think a person could take weeks reading Sexton's works, trying to be sure that Gabriel wasn't making an important reference to one poem or another and I haven't taken that time. But I feel sure that three important works are the poems "45 Mercy Street" and "Rowing Towards God" and the play "Mercy Street," which seem to cover the great majority of Gabriel's references.

It's darkly edifying to have listened to this song and casually mused over the lyrics, then find this larger, dark world connected to it. I'd imagined Gabriel's song – quite as "45 Mercy Street" spells out in more detail, as an older woman trying to remember an earlier childhood before her life became so disappointing. It's heartbreaking to know that the story was real and that it's far too late for it to turn out better.