Sexton opens “The Expatriates” with an intimate address: “My dear” (Line 1). This address both grounds the poem in a context of a lover’s speech to a beloved and disarms the reader, inviting the reader to understand the poem as an intimate love letter addressed to the reader.

After this first phrase, Sexton splits the line with a comma, which is a technique known as a caesura, or, a musical rest in the middle of a poetic line. The phrase following the address specifies that “it was a moment” (Line 1), without elaborating on the meaning of the pronoun “it” and drawing attention to the brevity of the “moment.” The following line repeats the word “moment”: “to clutch at for a moment” (Line 2). This repetition further emphasizes the specificity of the poem as a whole, without providing the reader with a picture of to what exactly this specificity refers.

The first stanza continues to emphasize the specificity of the moment without yet informing the reader about what “it” (Lines 4, 5) may be. The ambiguity propels the reader forward in the poem, inviting the reader to seek answers; it also clears a space for the reader to fill with the reader’s own intimate and personal experiences.