The poem “the starry night” is inspired by Vincent Van Gogh’s famous painting Starry Night. There is a lot of common group between the artist and the poets work. In both the works by Vincent Van Gogh and Anne Sexton the readers are exposed to a sense of suicidal tendency, really dramatic imagery and immortalization of the artist by their work. Sexton in her works portray a desire for death which reflects her suicidal nature and the fact that she eventually committed suicide.
The poet has used a lot of imagery to draw a mental picture of the painting in the readers head which helps her to show her interpretation towards the painting. In the first stanza the speaker mentions “one black haired tree slip up like a drowned women into …show more content…
The drawn women are represented in their significance through Song’s use of “paper” as a motif. The recurrent motif of paper supports the theme of female beauty. Song’s imagery personifies the women’s beauty, as they are described to have “arranged themselves,” coming to life off of the page – “the skinlike paper” (Song). The motif of paper is further developed in comparison to the imagery of skin: “whatever skin was exposed was powdered white as snow…he transposed the trembling plum lips like a drop of blood soaking up the white expanse of paper” (Song). More specifically, there is a strong literary contrast between the imagery of paper and the description of skin, that is, they are both depicted as intensely white, which is juxtaposed blatantly by the imagery of blood. A further element of imagery in “Beauty and Sadness,” which helps support the theme of female beauty, is the “nimble man[‘s]…invisible presence”. Such an oxymoron serves to limit portrayal of the man’s physical characteristics, highlighting the significance the imagery Song uses to portray the beauty of the female body. The notion that he is a “bespectacled painter” illuminates the idea that the women, whom he draws, characterize his persona, just as he personifies their