Poems Inspired by Paintings: The Disquieting Muses

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Art has a way of speaking out to an audience. Painters share their story through a paint brush, creating such a magnificent illustration. Each unique piece of craft represents a fairy tale, fiction, nonfiction, or personal story. The audience forms their own story line when analyzing a painting, which may differ or relate to the message that the artist wants to portray. Another beautiful art is literature. When reading a stanza, it paints a picture in the reader's head. Occasionally, writers can be inspired by such paintings. Sylvia Plath is one of the many writers who fell exceptional of such a piece; she decided to use the same title for her poem. "The Disquieting Muses" was painted by Giorgio de Chirico and later on the painting encouraged Plath to write a poem, using the same title. These two pieces of art differ from one another, but acquire a special similarity.
In the literature piece "The Disquieting Muses" the speaker opens the stanza with such anger towards her mother for allowing three women, who are unwanted by the speaker, into her bedroom. The speaker makes it seem as if these three women are immoral and surreal, because these women are described as "illbred", "disfigured", "with heads like darning-eggs" (Plath, page 1047). The first stanza represents failure as a mother who did not provide her child with security and protection from evil mishaps. The connection in their mother and daughter bond is nonexistent. The speaker is broken and speaks on the unhappy memories that disturb her mind. As the poem deepens, these three women muses have become a permanent haunting to the speaker. For example in the second paragraph, "Mother, whose witches always, always, Got baked into gingerbread, I wonder Whether you saw them, wh...

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...ng symbolizes awareness and unreachable issues. The interconnections between these two art pieces are the three muses. It is important to notice this because the muses have the power in each piece. Although their powers differed, each of the muses presented something in each of the pieces. The three muses were the main characters, and both of the stories circled around the three muses. Each artist has their own meaning towards the muses they put in their story but, each of them symbolize something personal and cultural. For example, the three muses in Plath’s poem reflected the three negative emotions of the speaker and the failure of a healthy relationship with her mother. The muses in Plath’s poem slowly became the speaker’s guardian. Meanwhile, the muses in De Chirico’s painting indicated awareness, worries on the war, and hopes on the future once the war ended.

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