Confessions of the Mind

For many poets, writing about nature and love is an easy feat. The poets who are considered in the Confessional Genre draw their influence from something quite different though. They use their own life experiences of pain and suffering to create great poems. In Theodore Roethke’s “Dolor,” Sylvia Plath’s “Mirror,” and Sharon Olds’ “The Planned Child,” these three poets confess their inner pain about matters that effect them and, they have created hits.
Roethke’s poem focuses on pain, with the use of the word “dolor.” It is about an office building that is so monotonous, that your individuality is taken away from you. The pencils are even saddened because they are “neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper-weight” (p 738, 2). They are not used, not even to lie on a desk as a placeholder. The room is supposed to be an “immaculate public place” (p 738, 4), but there will always be an unseen film of dust. Roethke is comparing the people from t...