Poetry Essay Example for Free

Poetry EssayUnderstanding and interpreting poetry requires a diverse method of reading than the method which is generally associated with prose. While a given poem, especially a lyric poem, may be literally read in a matter of minutes, the comprehension of the poem may take a lifetime. This is due to the extraordinary ability of poets to compress meanings and also develop complex and multi-layered associations of language, metaphorical language, image, rhyme, and even narrative within a very brief literary forms. Contemplating a poem is as much a part of experiencing it as provided reading a poem. In the hands of a talented and inspired poet, the minimal use of words and the seemingly constricted forms offered by poetry ar actually platforms to convey thoughts, themes, and emotions that would find no more 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 Sex tons poem, Starry Night provides a rich demonstration of how poetry conveys multiple 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. close to often, in poetry, it involves painting. When writing a poems inspired by paintings, poets attempt to make language, image, and meter evoke the same emotional or thematic impact which is delivered by the visual techniques and textures of paintings. In The Starry Night,Anne Sexton was inspired not only by Vincent Van van Goghts painting of the same title, but by a letter 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 night to paint the stars. By including the quotation form Van Goght above the body of her poem, Sexton accomplishes a clever micro chip of compression, in fact expl icating the poems theme before a word of the poem, proper, has a chance to even be read by the referee This sly trick is compatible with Van Goghs technique in the painting The Starry Night which discards subtlety in favor of splendour and obscurity in favor of explicit emotional expression.In the painting we see a night sky 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 alive and engages the viewer relentlessly. The overall initial experience is one of being overwhelmed by the immensity of cosmic nature. Below a set of trilled hill 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 to a lower place the sky, suggesting that it is the religious and spiritual dialogue between humanity and the cosmos which is of the most importance, not the town itself. Similarly, Sexton begins her poem, The town does not exist establishing the primacy of a non-linear humor of perception, as well as setting the stage for the eventual, climactic religious epiphany. Van Gogh painted Starry Night while in an foundation at Saint-Remy in 1889. According to many sources his behavior 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 yet another dream, and told it his brethren, and said, Behold, I have dreamed a dream more and, behold, the sun and the moon and the eleven stars make obeisance to me greatly influenced Van Goghs The Starry Night. Sexton, too, carefully reserves the numerical symbolism of the painting in her lines The night boils with eleven stars. /Oh comet-like starry night This is how/I want to die By repeating the ad jective starry, Sexton gains the crowded feeling of Van Goghs tack in her stanza. She grasps the living sky atom 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, impenetrable 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 erotic/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 confessional mode, also capturing an element which is perhaps understated in Van Goghs original, but present nonetheless, a confession of deep loneliness and alienation, marked by the darker swirls o f color on the paintings peripheries and also by the lone black tree, which Sexton describes as a drowned woman marking for posterity her close appellative 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.