Poetry Essay

Understanding and interpreting poetry requires a different regularity of reading than the method which is generally associated with prose. While a given poem, especially a lyric poem, whitethorn be literally read in a matter of minutes, the comprehension of the poem may deal out a lifetime. This is due to the extraordinary ability of poets to compress meanings and besides develop complex and multi-layered associations of language, figurative language, image, rhyme, and regular narrative within a very brief literary forms. Contemplating a poem is as practically a part of experiencing it as merely reading a poem.In the hands of a able and inspire poet, the minimal use of words and the seemingly constricted forms offered by poetry are very 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, An ne sacristans poem, Starry Night provides a rich demonstration of how poetry conveys multiple meanings and associations within a minimalist form. To begin with, sacristans 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 delineation. When writing a poems inspired by paintings, poets attempt to make language, image, and meter evoke the same emotional or thematic refer which is delivered by the visual techniques and textures of paintings. In The Starry Night,Anne sexton was inspired not only by Vincent train 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. because I go/out at night to paint the stars. By including the quotation form avant-garde Goght above the body of her poem, Sexton accomplishes a clever bit of co mpression, in fact explicating the poems theme before a word of the poem, proper, has a chance to even be read by the reader This sly trick is compatible with forefront Goghs technique in the painting The Starry Night which discards subtlety in favor of grandeur and obscurity in favor of obvious emotional expression.In the painting we see a night sky crowded with swirling clouds, blazing starts with yearning halos and a moon which reflects each of the lunar phases in one image. All of these attributes are exaggerated, pulling the spectator pump into a causeting of epic epiphany and emotional release. Van Goghts sky is alive and engages the viewer relentlessly. The boilersuit initial experience is one of being overwhelmed by the immensity of cosmic nature. Below a set of rolling hill lies a small town. The focal point of the town is the large church- steeple, which presides over the end of the buildings.This steeple seems to anchor the town and the rest of the scene beneath the sky, suggesting that it is the religious and spiritual dialogue mingled with 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 mode of perception, as well as setting the stage for the eventual, climactic religious epiphany. Van Gogh painted Starry Night while in an Asylum at Saint-Remy in 1889. According to numerous 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 cardinal stars made 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 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 twain 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 special K 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, as well as capturing an element which is perhaps understated in Van Goghs original, but present nonetheless, a confession of deep loneliness a nd 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 blotto 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 communicative potential of transposing the themes textures and techniques from one art medium to another.