Poetry Essay

Understanding and interpreting verse line requires a different method of take uping than the method which is gener completelyy associated with prose. date a given meter, especially a lyric metrical composition, may be literally read in a matter of minutes, the comprehension of the meter may take a lifetime. This is due to the extraordinary ability of poets to pressure meanings and also develop complex and multi-layered associations of language, figurative language, image, rhyme, and notwithstanding narrative at he dodge a very brief literary forms. Contemplating a poem is as much a part of experiencing it as merely reading a poem.In the hands of a talented and inspired poet, the minimal consumption of words and the seemingly constricted forms offered by verse line are really platforms to convey thoughts, opuss, and emotions that would find no much complete expression even if given the larger platform of a novel, essay, or even memoir. As an example of this multi-tiered expression that is found in good poetry, Anne sextons poem, Starry Night provides a rich demonstration of how poetry conveys denary meanings and associations within a minimalist form. To begin with, sextons poem The Starry Night is an exercise in ekphrasis.Ekphrasis is a type of poem written about another art-form. Most often, in poetry, it involves word-painting. When writing a poems inspired by paintings, poets attempt to make language, image, and meter evoke the analogous aroused or thematic impact which is delivered by the visual techniques and textures of paintings. In The Starry Night,Anne sacristan was inspired not only by Vincent cutting edge van Goghts painting of the same title, but by a garner the artist wrote to his brother, which contained the epigraph for Sextons poem That does not keep me from having a terrible need/of shall I say the word religion.Then I go/out at shadow to paint the stars. By including the source form train Goght above the body of her po em, Sexton accomplishes a knowing bit of compression, in fact explicating the poems theme in the first place a word of the poem, proper, has a chance to even be read by the reader This sly trick is compatible with Van Goghs technique in the painting The Starry Night which discards shadiness in favor of grandeur and obscurity in favor of lucid emotional expression.In the painting we see a night discard crowded with swirling clouds, blazing starts with burning halos and a moon which reflects each of the lunar phases in one image. All of these attributes are exaggerated, pulling the viewer into a setting of epic epiphany and emotional release. Van Goghts sky is vivacious and engages the viewer relentlessly. The oerall initial experience is one of being overwhelmed by the immensity of cosmic nature. Below a set of rolling cumulus lies a small town. The focal point of the town is the large church- steeple, which presides over the rest of the buildings.This steeple seems to anchor the town and the rest of the scene under the sky, suggesting that it is the religious and spiritual dialogue between humanity and the cosmos which is of the close importance, not the town itself. Similarly, Sexton begins her poem, The town does not exist establishing the primacy of a non-linear mode of perception, as well as setting the stage for the eventual, climactic religious epiphany. Van Gogh painted Starry Night mend in an Asylum at Saint-Remy in 1889. According to many sources his deportment was erratic during this period of his life. During his youth, Van Gogh had dedicated his life to the church.many believe that Genesis 379 And he dreamed besides another dream, and t obsolescent it his brethren, and said, Behold, I have dreamed a dream more and, behold, the sun and the moon and the eleven stars made obeisance to me greatly influenced Van Goghs The Starry Night. Sexton, too, carefully reserves the numerical symbolization of the painting in her lines The night boils with eleven stars. /Oh starry starry night This is how/I want to die By repeating the adjective starry, Sexton gains the crowded feeling of Van Goghs canvas in her stanza. She grasps the living sky element in the following lines It moves.They are all alive. /Even the moon bulges in its orange irons. The key to Sextons masterful ekphrasis seems to lie in her use of compressed diction The old unseen serpent swallows up the stars. This, like Van Goghs hurried, thick brush stroked invokes a sense of both urgency and passion. Sextons use of the refrain This is how I want to die encapsulates the theme of Van Goghs paining, that of religious ecstacy, by merging the sexy/death urge so common in Elizabethan poetry and here marked by an additional shading of surrealism sucked up by that great dragon, to split/from my life with no flag.In so doing, Sexton remains true to her justificational mode, also capturing an element which is perhaps understated in Van Goghs original, but present non etheless, a confession of deep loneliness and alienation, marked by the darker swirls of color on the paintings peripheries and also by the lone black tree, which Sexton describes as a drowned woman marking for posterity her close identification with the emotional confessional and religious themes of Van Goghs painting.Sextons poem is a wonderful counterpoint to Van Goghs painting, a rich example of the artistic and expressive potential of transposing the themes textures and techniques from one art medium to another.