Many people may look at the same painting and all come away with their own understanding. Every person has their bias and preconceptions that will influence their personal experience. In this paper we will discuss how Anne Sexton described in a short poem her experience of viewing Vincent Van Gogh’s painting The Starry Night. We will observe how Anne Sexton’s poem based on Van Gogh’s painting speaks about death in darkness as the painting seems to emphasise the light in the darkness.
“The Starry Night” by Anne Sexton describes her experience of visiting Van Gogh’s painting during a gallery showing. Anne Sexton’s Poem “The Starry Night” is written in reference to Vincent Van Gogh’s painting The Starry Night sent to his brother. She writes this poem with a heavy hearted tone, and the understanding of Van Gogh’s work to be a destructive painting, full of darkness and longing for death to come. Sexton views the town at the foot of the hills as decaying and silent as it slowly disappear below the starry night. More importantly Sexton sees the tree that looks like the hair of dead woman drifting in the blue sky which is like a serpent that is sly and deceitful. Like the understanding of the evil of the sea in the times of the ancient near east, she saw the swirling sky similarly. Through this she then sees the night like a beast that brings chaos and destruct, removing all that is beautiful. For she says the even the eleven starts, so beautiful with the moon will be swallowing up by the beast of the night. She writes as if all of this was once beautiful and a source of life to this earth, however is now destroyed, and source of longing for the destruction of life.
On the other hand in the painting The Starry Nigh...
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...retation of the painting some aspects were surprising to how dark and heavy hearted she could speak, she took an interesting perspective. However in her interpretative poem she found a perspective of the painting that connected with her. As she used every stroke of darkness painted into the canvas an opportunity to have it symbolize this darkness and evil that resides in the world. It told her story and her experience of a starry night. Similarly Van Gogh had used every stroke of light painted into the canvas to be a symbol of beauty, and a symbol of his fascination of the night sky and its illuminating lights. He uses swift movements of his brush to depict a sky that seem to be able to sweep the mind away from the frustrations of this world in to the dreamy night light. A single painting worth a million words tells many stories through every perspective.
The timeline carries on chronologically, the intense imagery exaggerated to allow the poem to mimic childlike mannerisms. This, subjectively, lets the reader experience the adventure through the young speaker’s eyes. The personification of “sunset”, (5) “shutters”, (8) “shadows”, (19) and “lamplights” (10) makes the world appear alive and allows nothing to be a passing detail, very akin to a child’s imagination. The sunset, alive as it may seem, ordinarily depicts a euphemism for death, similar to the image of the “shutters closing like the eyelids”
Imagery uses five senses such as visual, sound, olfactory, taste and tactile to create a sense of picture in the readers’ mind. In this poem, the speaker uses visual imagination when he wrote, “I took my time in old darkness,” making the reader visualize the past memory of the speaker in “old darkness.” The speaker tries to show the time period he chose to write the poem. The speaker is trying to illustrate one of the imagery tools, which can be used to write a poem and tries to suggest one time period which can be used to write a poem. Imagery becomes important for the reader to imagine the same picture the speaker is trying to convey. Imagery should be speculated too when writing a poem to express the big
“Her face was fair and pretty, with eyes like two bits of night-sky, each with a star dissolved in the blue.” This elaborate simile creates a mental image of the natural beauty of the young princess, Irene, by comparing her eyes to the night sky. The simile also parallels the depth of Irene’s soul to the dark, endless night sky.
These lines may seem confusing if not read properly. At first look, these might not make sense because the night is acquainted with darkness, but when the lines are read together as intended, one can see that the night is “cloudless” and filled with “starry skies” (1, 1-2). The remaining lines of the first stanza tell the reader that the woman's face and eyes combine all the greatness of dark and light:
In conclusion, Van Gogh used the elements above to create a man by himself in a field. He used color to represent feeling rather than represent realism of an event. The cool colors represent the field and happiness in his work. The warm colors represent the harshness of the day and could be a metaphor for life. He used scale and proportion to emphasis the overbearing sun. He also used proportion and scale to represent literally and figuratively how far away home was. The linear perspective was only evident to me after I really studied the used of lines. I followed the lines to the horizon and left side of the painting.
Emily Dickinson is well-known as a poet who lived a secluded and sheltered life. Many of her poems focus on subjects of death and dying. In “Because I could not stop for death”, Emily Dickinson expresses her very personal thoughts on death and what follows. She presents these thoughts in the form of a poem in which she shares her feelings and philosophies as someone who experienced life as a sheltered recluse. This paper will review Emily Dickinson’s poem, and will evaluate her use of familiar sensory stimuli to describe the three stages of life as well as her use of personifications, metaphoric devices, and tone to illuminate death in a pleasant light and contradict its connotation as the end.
When first approaching this work, one feels immediately attracted to its sense of wonder and awe. The bright colors used in the sun draws a viewer in, but the astonishment, fascination, and emotion depicted in the expression on the young woman keeps them intrigued in the painting. It reaches out to those who have worked hard in their life and who look forward to a better future. Even a small event such as a song of a lark gives them hope that there will be a better tomorrow, a thought that can be seen though the countenance by this girl. Although just a collection of oils on a canvas, she is someone who reaches out to people and inspires them to appreciate the small things that, even if only for a short moment, can make the road ahead seem brighter.
Art is a severe Goddess, who in return for her smiles demands many sacrifices. No one did more to please her, and no one was so insufficiently rewarded as Van Gogh. Several times the blows that she dealt him were painful enough to make any reasonable man resign. Only fanaticism and faith in her would permit one to leap the abyss between reality and desire. With cruel, merciless method, art asked from Van Gogh everything. It was a loan that multiplied with time and was never paid back. It haunted him within the recesses of his soul, it flirted with him and raises his hopes, it took away from him everything that was dear, and when it could finally take no more, it decided to take his life.
This painting by Vincent Van Gogh is on display at the Art Institute of Chicago Museum, in the Impressionism exhibit. There are many things going on in this painting that catch the viewer’s eye. The first is the piece’s vibrant colors, light blues and browns, bright greens, and more. The brush strokes that are very visible and can easily be identified as very thick some might even say bold. The furniture, the objects, and the setting are easy to identify and are proportioned to each other. There is so much to see in this piece to attempt to explain in only a few simple sentences.
The 20th Century American poet, Anne Sexton once said, “Poetry should be a shock to the senses. It should almost hurt.” Sexton displays this belief through her writing style and set of controversial themes, which unquestionably shocked critics at times. Many of Sexton’s poems reflect on her personal struggles with mental illness and her numerous encounters with suicidal feelings. Sexton became known as a confessional poet because of her autobiographical style of writing. The main themes of her poetry are depression and death. “Wanting to Die”, “The Truth the Dead Know”, “The Abortion”, and “The Starry Night”, are all examples of Sexton’s writing that portray her central poetic themes. Through the use of vivid visual imagery, especially natural
Personification of the sun is shown where the narrator indicates that the sun passed them in lines 12 and 13. This presents a highly styled poem that has used diverse stylistic features to communicate to the readers. Symbolism and objectification has been extensively used to communicate where the narrator uses first person to narrate the story.
My first observation of this painting is the bright pastel colors that are used that are far different from the dark, dull, flat colors used in our first image. The lines used in this piece of art differ from that of “The Third of May” as they are communicative lines rather than directional lines. Communicative lines suggest feelings and emotions to the viewer. The lines in Van Gogh’s artwork are mostly vertical lines that imply a sense of uneasiness was taking place in that bedroom. By using vertical lines the artist communicated certain emotions he was feeling at the time he painted
Have you ever been in darkness for so long and felt like you lost the only thing that you needed the most? Some people lose their sight of things and can’t regain it back, just like Emily Dickinson, the author of “we grow accustomed to the dark” and “Before I got my eye put out”. Although some people might interpret the meaning of the two poems differently than others, they still have both a literal and symbolic meaning to them.
This piece of the poem is full of the images of nature. The image of sun and the moon can be find throughout the whole work, but in this part it probably poses as a symbol of rationality and intellect. Its function differs from the function of the moon and its light shines its rays of light on things to make them clearer, more comprehensible and earthly. T...
The imagery of darkness, gloom, and death are present in every aspect of the story from the start of this novella to the finish, giving it an air of mystery, and despair, almost like a dream, or a nightmare. The reader automatically senses that something is not quite right, in setting of the tale, and as the haze drifts in and out of the pages, the reader is enlightened little by little.