Eternal Death Into The Starry Night

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Eternal Death into the Starry Night Anne Sexton, inspired by Van Gogh's "The Starry Night," creates a diverse artistic creation in her poem "The Starry Night.” Sexton vividly depicts various themes such as life, death, and power. The speaker is finitely drawn to the night for it is a source of eternal death. Although there are multiple themes, the idea of death is very much stressed; therefore, the imagery of the poem is solely based on death. The speaker discusses her peaceful way of wanted to pass on into the Starry Night. Early in the poem, the speaker describes the tree in the painting as a “black-haired” woman who slips into the sky and drowns (Sexton 2). Sextons also expresses the town as non-existing as if it doesn’t even care that the woman drowns. The town continues to be silent as the woman slowly dies. The speaker reacts by yelling into the night sky not in protest but, telling it that she wants to die in the same way. In the second verse Sexton writes, “Even the moon bulges in its orange irons to push children, like a god, from its eye.” The speaker is giving the moon a “god-like” quality, in other words, the moon has the ability to create and destroy. “The old unseen serpent” evokes a sense of power as well as themes of destruction reoccur as the serpent “swallows up the stars”. The speaker then repeats her refrain, “Oh starry starry night! This is how/ I want to die” (10-12); this time, however, indicating that the next stanza will describe once again who how she wants to die into the Starry Night. In the third verse, the speaker asks to be devoured by “that rushing beast of the night” (13). As death takes the speaker and separates her from her life, she promises to have “no flag, no belly, no cry” (16-17), which means that she chooses to go quietly into the night without question. Whether the speaker is a part of the painting, perhaps one of
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