Oh Starry Starry Night

Oh starry starry night, is poem about the painting starry night by van Gogh, and it tells the story of van Gogh's painting through the eyes of a mentally depressed, suicidal woman. In my opinion I feel as though when she wrote this she was empathisising with van Gogh write then.

When van Gogh wrote this, he was in an asylum, and I think that the poet Anne Sexton, felt like she knew his pain; she felt like she knew what he was thinking when he saw those stars, and painted them carefully that night.

She does more then just describe the poem, she goes past that, at first describing what she sees in the poem, she goes past that and describes her reaction to the poem. And she does it with beautiful craft, until your not sure where the painting stops and her own thoughts begin.

"into that rushing beast of the night,   

sucked up by that great dragon, to split   

from my life with no flag,

no belly,

no cry."

 

This is my favorite part of the poem, it is the last stanza, and this is the stanza where her true voice shines through; in fact, if you saw this stanza on its own you probably wouldn't know that it was about Starry Night.

 

The line that confuses me the most is the second. "sucked up by that dragon, to split," and I know that "to split" is not the end of the sentance, but but what I don't understand the dragon. Sure she mention that the night is a beast so we must assume that she is referencing that point, but is it safe to assume that in the nexzt lines she is talking about death, dying alone, and dying painlessly.

As was her death.