The Starry Night (1962). Content and Description

In “The Starry Night,” published in her second collection, All My Pretty Ones, Sexton relies on dazzling images to probe her desire to be incorporated into the divine. Crafting an evocative description of Vincent Van Gogh’s famous expressionistic painting, Sexton plays with the idea of death. As the poet’s was, Van Gogh’s life was tormented and ended in suicide. Including the quotation from Van Gogh’s letter, Sexton stresses a connection between the starry night and religion, between the heavens and Heaven.

Her poetry often involves a religious quest, as well as a fascination with death; those themes combine here with a longing to control her own death, which she emphasizes in her twice-repeated phrase “This is how / I want to die.” After the final repetition, she elaborates on her desire for a death that is dramatic, natural, but somehow lacking in physicality—she wishes to be “sucked up” by some unseen divine force, to be pulled without fanfare or pain into the spinning star-filled night sky: “sucked up by that great dragon, to split / from my life with no flag, / no belly/ no cry.”

Sexton’s images describe the movement and power of Van Gogh’s painting. For her, the silent, angularly drawn town is not important; it is the curling, coiling lines that she focuses on, for in the movement, she sees life and strength.

The most prominent image in the foreground of the painting is the dark, waving vegetation that reaches up into the sky. Sexton finds it ominously personal: “one black haired tree slips up like a drowned woman into the hot sky.” She emphasizes heat: “The night boils with eleven stars.” She evokes an invisible authority that moves and controls the heavens—“The old unseen serpent swallows up the stars”—and gives the Moon godly attributes: it “bulges in its orange irons / to push children, like a god, from its eye.”

Sexton’s style in this poem, as usual, is deliberately colloquial and accessible. In two simple six-line verses and one five-line extended sentence, she shows us her interpretation of Van Gogh’s painting and overlays it with her own longing to know spirituality and death. She depends on the use of short direct statements interspersed among complex descriptions: “The town is silent.” “It moves. They are all alive.” “This is how / I want to die.” Her many monosyllabic word choices effectively convey the sense of the painting, as well as her own quest for a physical and spiritual transformation.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. Compare the painting by Van Gogh to Sexton’s poem that evokes it. You can find a copy of the painting at http://www.vangoghgallery.com/ painting/starrynight.html.

2. Read the poem aloud and listen for repetition of the sounds. What sound do you hear most? Does recognizing frequent sound repetition help you get a sense of the mood or meaning of the poem that otherwise might escape you?