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In the poem "To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Triumph", Anne Sexton alludes to the flight of Icarus and Daedalus and to "To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing" to convey a message to a friend. I think this poem was written to reassure ....

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... to catch the allusion to Yeats' poem. I believe she wanted her friend to know that what she did was the right thing. Perhaps she compared her friend to Yeats' friend. Sexton wrote "Think of the difference it made!" referring to Icarus' flight. She might have wanted her friend to realize a difference her defying her father made. The final line of the poem has a comparably different tone than the first 13 lines. The last line, "See him acclaiming the sun and come plunging down while his sensible daddy goes straight into town.", seems more mocking of Daedalus' flight. It seems that Sexton feels that Daedalus' flight was a wasted chan ...