Creating Meaning
Creating Sound
Alliteration, Assonance, and Consonance
Using Form
- Sonnet
- Sestina
Poetry and art have long gone together as sources of creative expression. Sometimes, these two mediums even intertwine as a poet reflects upon a painting as a starting point for a piece of writing. The poet may interpret what is happening in the scene or what the painter was feeling when creating the masterpiece. Since the poem is an interpretation, it may or may not reflect what you see in the painting. Consider these examples. Robert Fagles and Anne Sexton both chose to write about Vincent Van Gogh's painting The Starry Night. Study the details of the painting before you read either poem.
"The Starry Night"
Anne Sexton
The town does not exist
except where one black-haired tree slips
up like a drowned woman into the hot sky.
The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars.
Oh starry starry night! This is how
I want to die.
It moves. They are all alive.
Even the moon bulges in its orange irons
to push children, like a god, from its eye.
The old unseen serpent swallows up the starts.
Oh starry starry night! This is how
I want to die:
into that rushing beast of night,
sucked up by that great dragon, to split
from my life with no flag,
no belly,
no cry.
"The Starry Night"
Robert Fagles
Long as I paint
I feel myself
less mad
the brush in my hand
a lightning rod to madness
But never ground that madness
execute it ride the lightning up
from these benighted streets and steeple up
with the cypress look its black is burning green
I am that I am it cries
it lifts me up the nightfall up
the cloudrack coiling like a dragon's flanks
a third of the stars in heaven wheeling in its wake
wheels in wheels around the moon that cradles round the sun
and if I can only trail these whirling eternal stars
with one sweep of the brush like Michael's sword if I can
cut the life out of the beast - safeguard the mother and the son
all heaven will hymn in conflagration blazing down
the night the mountain ranges down
the claustrophobic valleys of the mad
Madness
is what I have instead of heaven
God deliver me - help me now deliver
all this frenzy back into your hands
our brushstrokes burning clearer into dawn.
Class Discussion:
Prepare answers to the following questions for tomorrow's class discussion.
What aspect of the painting did each poet choose to focus on as a starting point for writing?
What is the tone of each poem and which reflects more closely what you see as the mood of the painting?
What elements of poetry did each poet use and how did those elements contribute to the poem as a whole?
What details of the painting do you see in the poems?
Who is the speaker of each poem? Why did Fagles use the pronoun "our" in the last line of his poem?
Some poetry is expressed with music. Compare Don MacLean's song "Vincent" to the two poems above.
