Responce To Poetry: Anne Sexton

I decided to write about Starry Night by Anne Sexton. In the poem, she describes what she thinks is the message of Vincent Van Gogh’s painting The Starry Night.

Anne Sexton stresses how beautiful Van Gogh’s painting really is. She uses a lot of repetition in the poem, saying “Oh starry starry night/ This is how I want to die.” This confused me slightly. I couldn’t understand why she would put something like death in while describing something beautiful. Then again, Vincent Van Gogh was in an insane asylum when he painted The Starry Night, so maybe she was trying to relate back to him, and show all of the readers the importance of looking “below the surface” of something.

Perhaps all of Anne Sexton’s work carries this same kind of emotion and feeling, combining two very unlike things. I like how she managed to add in what Vincent Van Gogh would have thought, and the poem isn’t based around what she thinks. Being that Van Gogh took his life shortly after this, I now see why she continually repeated “Starry starry night/ This is how I want to die.”  It is a very interesting thing that I would like to try to put into my poetry.