Exercise: Ekphrastic Poetry

Return to your description of Starry Night from the introduction chapter. Read over it and look at the painting again (there are very high-resolution copies online that you can use to look at the painting really closely). Notice what you focused on.

Now find the poem “Starry Night” by Anne Sexton. It is available in books and online.

Looking at the poem, answer the following questions about Anne Sexton’s take on Starry Night.

1. What does Sexton mean by “The town does not exist”?
2. What is the effect of describing the tree as “like a drowned woman”? Is it how you understood the dark figure in the foreground of the painting?
3. Why does Anne Sexton think the sky is “hot” and “boiling”?
4. “The old unseen serpent swallows up the stars” might make us think that Sexton sees the sky as the inside of a snake or dragon’s mouth. What other details of the painting support this dark interpretation of the sky?
5. The speaker in this poem is clearly in a powerful emotional state. What other ways does it affect their interpretation of the painting?^[1]
6. Look back at your earlier work and the painting. How is the interpretation of van Gogh’s painting in this poem different to the way you see or saw the painting? Has the way you see the painting now been affected or changed by the poem?

1. We might think of the speaker as Anne Sexton, or she might be writing as Vincent van Gogh as he paints, or she might be writing as someone else looking at the landscape or at Van Gogh’s painting. ↑