Venus and the Ark - Question 3

I think Anne Sexton called her poem a spoof because she is mocking humanity. Venus was the ancient Roman goddess of love, beauty, and fertility, and was always depicted as a beautiful woman. The fact that the two humans in the poem were male ph.D.'s is Sexton's way of laughing at humanity, and through the use of this irony, makes the point that despite all of man's supposed intelligence, it still has a capacity for stupidity and basic oversight. This is even more obvious in the poem's juxtaposition of Venus, a symbol of love and beauty, and the war and atrocities that man commits on Earth. By the end of the poem, I think Sexton is, in a way, pointing out that man has both the capacity for creation and destruction, a point that implies that she has not completely lost faith in humanity.