Analysis Of The Starry Night By Anne Sexton

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The 20th Century American poet, Anne Sexton once said, “Poetry should be a shock to the senses. It should almost hurt.” Sexton displays this belief through her writing style and set of controversial themes, which unquestionably shocked critics at times. Many of Sexton’s poems reflect on her personal struggles with mental illness and her numerous encounters with suicidal feelings. Sexton became known as a confessional poet because of her autobiographical style of writing. The main themes of her poetry are depression and death. “Wanting to Die”, “The Truth the Dead Know”, “The Abortion”, and “The Starry Night”, are all examples of Sexton’s writing that portray her central poetic themes. Through the use of vivid visual imagery, especially natural …show more content…

Sexton wrote her second book, All My Pretty Ones, during a very hard time in her life. “During the years of her apprenticeship as a poet, Sexton herself had lost a beloved great-aunt and both of her parents to premature deaths; and her own chronic illness, punctuated with suicide attempts, had felt like a death threat miraculously survived”(Middlebrook 3). Poems such as "The Truth the Dead Know," "The Starry Night," and "The Abortion" within this book, are “elegies or eloquent evocations of these losses” (Middlebrook 3). All My Pretty Ones and her next book Live or Die contained some of Sexton’s best and most notable poems. Both books focused on Sexton’s curiosity with living or dying as Sexton continuously struggled with her depression and contemplated suicide. In the 1970s, as the very lonely Sexton became addicted to drugs and alcohol, she reached her mental breaking point. After finishing what she planned to be her last book, Sexton sat inside her car in her closed garage until she killed herself by carbon monoxide poisoning. Sexton’s death did not come as a shock to many because she left behind books full of warning signs with the majority of her poems written in a depressive mindset with a central theme of death. One critic said that, “Sexton’s poetry saved her as long as saving was possible” (Levertov …show more content…

In the second stanza, Sexton drives from the funeral to the Cape to “cultivate” herself or deal with her grief. She describes the images she sees on the cape such as the sun shining from the sky and uses a simile to describe the sea that “swings in like an iron gate”. The scenery, unlike Sexton’s emotions, are very lively and happy and the usage of this imagery makes the reader understand that the world was still turning even through the speaker’s life had just stopped due to her loss (Johnson 3). The end of the second stanza concludes with “in another country people die”, which brings back the poem’s theme of death and returns the poem to a more dismal tone showing that she cannot escape death or her grief. In the third stanza, Sexton addresses a loved one who is with her. Despite the wind falling like stones from “white hearted water” or the grief hitting her, her loved one touches her and she realizes that unlike the dead, she is not

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