JESSICA DAS                                                                                                                  809

Poetry Reading Response on Starry Night

I never saw myself as a poem person. In matter of fact I was dreadful when I heard our next subject in ELA was poetry. This week I’ve read a poem called Starry Night by Anne Sexton. I was pleasantly surprised by how much I liked the poem. It’s a poem off the artwork Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh. One discovery I made about the poem Starry Night by Anne Sexton is that the speaker is depressed. This is because in the poem she seems suicidal and has dark thoughts.

One important observation I made is the speaker is suicidal. For example in the poem the line “This is how I want to die” (Sexton 6, 12) is repeated several times in the text. This quote shows that the speaker is depressed because he is having thoughts about how he wants to die and how. This quote is also an example of verbal irony because most people don’t want to die yet in this quote the speaker contradicts what I expected her to say; instead the speaker says she wants to die.

Another important observation is the speaker has dark thoughts. In the poem the speaker says, “The town does not exist/ except where one black-haired tree slips/Up like a drowned women in the hot sky” (Sexton 3). This quote is an example of a simile. This is because the tree is compared to a drowned women in the sky by using the word like. This quote shows the speaker has dark thoughts about people and herself. This is because drowning is usually paired with death.

A final observation I made is the speaker sees herself as lifeless. This is shown in the poem when the speaker says, “Sucked up by that great dragon/ to split from my life with no flag/ no belly/ no cry”.  The line break in this quote is important because it emphasizes the fact that he is empty both physically and mentally.This quote shows that life has been taken away from the speaker and nothing is left. When there is no life there is only death and darkness.

I discovered many things in this poem such as the speaker wants to be free and die. The biggest discovery I made was that the speaker is depressed by the way she speaks her words and the specific words used in the poem. Vincent Van Gogh, the artist behind the painting was in a mental asylum when he drew the painting Starry Night and ended up killing himself. He was mental and depressed. I believe the speaker got into Vincent’s mind and got into the depressed mindset that he might have been in.