The Full Text of “The Starry Night”
The Full Text of “The Starry Night”
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“The Starry Night” Introduction
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"The Starry Night" is a 1962 ekphrastic poem by Anne Sexton, written in response to Vincent Van Gogh's famous painting of the same name. Gazing into a night sky, the poem's speaker (who might be Van Gogh himself, or another speaker admiring Van Gogh's painting) desperately wants to "die," to dissolve into the starry night for good. This is a poem about both a passionate spiritual response to beauty and a longing for annihilation. At the same time, it reflects the way that art can connect struggling souls across time and space, offering company and consolation.
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“The Starry Night” Summary
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Looking on a nighttime landscape, the speaker sees that the town below has vanished, except for a single tree falling up into the sky that looks like a drowning woman sinking into water. Everything is quiet, and eleven hot stars burn overhead. The speaker calls out to this starlit night and declares that this is the way they want to die.
The whole landscape, to this speaker, seems to move, and everything in it seems alive. The moon swells, looking as if it were barely held back by orange chains, and seems to birth children from its staring eye, as if it were an old god. An ancient, invisible snake seems to devour the stars. And once again, the speaker calls out to the starlit night, and says that this is the way they want to die.
The speaker wants to be devoured by the huge, swift, dragon of the night, leaving their life behind, surrendering their identity, their desires, and finally their voice.
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“The Starry Night” Themes
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The Release of Death
The speaker of “The Starry Night” gazes into Vincent Van Gogh’s famous painting of a brilliant night sky and longs to “die” and dissolve into it—or, more precisely, to be devoured by it, as if it were a “great dragon.” This kind of death might sound frightening, but to this speaker, being eaten up by the starry night would be a deep relief: an end to all the pains of life and an escape from the day-to-day burden of being a lonely, suffering person. This poem suggests that beauty (like the beauty of the night sky) can make people long for a spiritual experience that will release them from pain—and that such longing for transcendence can also be a death wish.
To this speaker, Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” is so lovely that it seems overwhelming, and even dangerous. Where many spiritual seekers have looked to the sky and seen a peaceful heaven, to this speaker the night’s beauty is a sea one can “drown” in or a “great dragon” that might devour anyone watching. In other words, the painted sky’s beauty is so intense that it’s dangerous, threatening to swallow the speaker right up.
But that thought doesn’t disturb the speaker at all. On the contrary, they repeat that “this is how / [they] want to die.” To this speaker, being devoured by the dangerous beauty of this starry night would be a relief, allowing them to leave behind their “flag,” their “belly,” and their “cry”—metaphors that might suggest identity, beliefs, appetites, and suffering (among other possibilities). Devoured by the “rushing beast” of the sky, they’d get to leave behind all the pain and complexity of life and become part of the bigger “alive[ness]” of the universe.
The speaker’s longing to be eaten up by this dangerous sky suggests, not just that they feel deeply moved by this artwork, but that they relate to the famously suicidal Van Gogh, sharing both his passionate vision of the world and his longing for death. A desire to lose oneself in the beauty of the world, this poem suggests, can go hand in hand with a longing to lose oneself in death: to a suffering person, death can look overwhelmingly lovely.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-17
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The Power of Art
On one level, “The Starry Night” is a poem about feeling lonely and longing for death. But the poem’s very existence also gestures to the power of art to make people feel less alone. The awestruck speaker of this poem, who longs to “die” by being devoured by the night sky, might be Vincent Van Gogh himself, creating his famous painting “The Starry Night.” But the speaker might equally be a later viewer admiring “The Starry Night,” feeling what Van Gogh felt. By blurring the boundaries between the painter and the art-lover, the poem suggests that art has the power to communicate intense emotional and spiritual experiences. Sharing those experiences seems to allow the speaker to slip out of their individual self and feel like they’re a part of something bigger.
The poem never makes it clear whether it’s spoken in Van Gogh’s own voice, or in another speaker’s voice as they look at Van Gogh’s painting. That ambiguity suggests that a powerful experience of beauty, recorded in art, can cross not only the boundaries of time and space, but the boundaries that separate one person from another. Whether the speaker is painting “The Starry Night” or merely looking at “The Starry Night,” they feel just the same things. By allowing people to communicate their experiences, the poem suggests, art also allows people to feel profoundly connected. (And the poem’s reader is implicitly invited to be part of this chain of inspiration and empathy, too!)
That point only feels clearer considering that the poem’s speaker longs to dissolve into the universe, giving up their individual identity to be part of the beauty of the starry night. Desiring nothing more than to “split / from [their] life” and be eaten up by the “rushing beast” of the night sky, the speaker suggests that there’s a deep pleasure in leaving the individual self behind to become part of something bigger (though, of course, it’s also possible that the speaker shares Van Gogh’s literal suicidal feelings). Art, the poem suggests, can help to temper loneliness and pain, reminding people that they’re never as alone as they might think.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-17
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “The Starry Night”
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Before Line 1
That does not ...
... to his brother"The Starry Night" begins with an epigraph: a quotation from one of the painter Vincent Van Gogh's many letters to his beloved brother Theo. In it, Van Gogh says that when he feels himself "having a terrible need of [...] religion," he "go[es] out at night to paint the stars."
That line will feel significant to anyone familiar with perhaps the most famous of Van Gogh's works, a painting called—you guessed it—"The Starry Night." This picture, a swirling night landscape lit by blazing stars, clearly inspired this poem. And the quotation from Van Gogh's letters right up top suggests that Van Gogh's life inspired this poem, too.
In other words, this poem will respond both to Van Gogh's beloved painting and to the feelings that Van Gogh recorded in both his visual art and his writings. Many of those feelings were painful ones: Van Gogh suffered from severe mental illness and often felt deeply alone. Searching for "religion" in the beauty of nature and art was one way he tried to find meaning, connection, and consolation.
The very existence of this poem, in turn, might suggest that art really can help people to connect: to share powerful experiences, to feel less alone. Though Van Gogh himself never lived to see how famous and beloved his paintings would become, his artwork has survived for generations, touching countless later viewers—including fellow artists like Anne Sexton.
All this is important to a reading of this poem because of the ambiguous identity of its speaker. There's more than one possibility here:
- The speaker could be Van Gogh himself, immersed in painting a real-life starry night, and longing for freedom from his pain.
- Or the speaker could be a later art-lover, looking at Van Gogh's painting and feeling what Van Gogh felt.
There's no way to say for sure which of these interpretations is right—and that's exactly the point. That uncertainty suggests that art allows powerful experiences to cross the boundaries between one person and another, helping people to feel connected. That connection adds an important undercurrent of "religion" to this poem's portrait of an isolated speaker who longs to die.
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Lines 1-4
The town does ...
... with eleven stars. -
Lines 5-6
Oh starry starry ...
... want to die. -
Lines 7-10
It moves. They ...
... up the stars. -
Lines 11-17
Oh starry starry ...
... no cry.
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“The Starry Night” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Metaphor
The poem's metaphors help readers to feel the speaker's intense response to the starry night.
All of the poem's metaphors suggest wild, vibrant, and often dangerous energy. To this speaker, the night doesn't sparkle or twinkle or glitter: it "boils with eleven stars," so "hot" it could burn. And the moon becomes something like a Titan, an old "god" chained to the sky with "orange irons" and writhing as it gives birth to endless "children" (perhaps those boiling stars themselves) through its staring "eye." In other words, there's nothing comfortable, peaceful, or consoling about this sky.
That becomes even clearer when the speaker starts to imagine the night as an "old unseen serpent," a "rushing beast," and a "great dragon": all images of powerful ancient creatures that might "swallow up" not just the stars, but the watching speaker.
All of these metaphors suggest that the speaker experiences this starry night as menacing, exciting, and very much alive. But they also hint that the speaker is seeing their own turbulent mind reflected in the night sky. The "old unseen serpent" that "swallows up the stars," for instance, might well be the same "serpent" that makes the speaker long to "die" in the first place: an embodiment of this speaker's strangely exuberant death wish.
Where metaphor appears in the poem:- Line 4: “The night boils with eleven stars. ”
- Line 8: “the moon bulges in its orange irons ”
- Line 10: “The old unseen serpent swallows up the stars. ”
- Line 13: “that rushing beast of the night, ”
- Line 14: “sucked up by that great dragon,”
- Lines 15-17: “no flag, / no belly, / no cry.”
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Simile
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Repetition
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Refrain
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Enjambment
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Asyndeton
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Assonance
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Sibilance
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Imagery
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"The Starry Night" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Irons
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(Location in poem: Line 8: “the moon bulges in its orange irons ”)
Chains—used here metaphorically to suggest that the moon seems to be chained to its place in the sky.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “The Starry Night”
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Form
"The Starry Night" is an ekphrastic poem: it describes and responds to a work of visual art. It uses turbulent free verse to reflect both the wild, rushing brushstrokes of Van Gogh's painting and the speaker's own inner turmoil.
The poem is built from three short stanzas, and the first two take roughly the same shape. They're both six lines long and move from shorter to longer lines and back again, so the poem looks like cresting waves on the page—a shape that echoes the whirling colors in Van Gogh's "The Starry Night." They also both return to the same desperate refrain:
Oh starry starry night! This is how
I want to die.But the final stanza does something a little different. It's briefer—only five lines long—and each of its lines is shorter than the last, until the speaker finally imagines "split[ting]":
from my life with no flag,
no belly,
no cry.That tapering-off mirrors the speaker's desire to "die," to vanish into this starry night.
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Meter
"The Starry Night" is written in free verse, so it doesn't use a regular meter. That said, its meaningful rhythms reflect the speaker's fascination and longing.
For instance, take a look at the changing line lengths in the poem's refrain:
Oh starry starry night! This is how
I want to die.The movement from a longer line and a drawn-out cry—"Oh starry starry night!"—to the one-two punch of "I want to die" reflects the speaker's complex feelings: the dangerous, frightening, exciting beauty of the night makes them long for swift annihilation.
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Rhyme Scheme
While there's no straightforward rhyme scheme in "The Starry Night," the poem intermittently uses plenty of rhyme and slant rhyme to evoke the speaker's longing to disappear into the stars.
The rhymes and assonance in the poem's second stanza are a good example:
[...] alive.
[...] irons
[...] like a god, from its eye.
[...]
[...] night! This is how
[...] die:There's one full rhyme here, between "eye" and "die." But that one rhyme is accompanied by a whole host of long /i/ sounds weaving all through this stanza. That long /i/ appears again and again in every stanza, a focused sound that evokes the speaker's transfixed gaze.
The repeated long /i/ sounds in this poem might also make readers think of both "eyes" and an "I": both relevant ideas here! As the speaker's hungry "eyes" eat up the night landscape, they long to escape their "I," their identity, and disappear into the starry sky.
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“The Starry Night” Speaker
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When the poem begins with a quotation from one of Vincent Van Gogh's letters to his brother Theo, it sets up a couple of possibilities about this speaker:
- On the one hand, the speaker could be Van Gogh himself, "go[ing] out at night to paint the stars" and looking out at the landscape that will inspire his most famous painting.
- On the other hand, the speaker could be a later art-lover looking at that painting.
That ambiguity helps the poem to suggest that art allows people to share emotions and experiences. Even if the speaker isn't Van Gogh, they seem to be feeling the same complicated feeling the beauty-loving but troubled Van Gogh must have felt: a kind of elated death wish, a full-body embrace of the world that leads to a desire for annihilation.
This speaker, then, is a passionate and unhappy soul, and one who sees the world with an uncommon intensity. They might be Van Gogh, the similarly troubled Anne Sexton herself, or just an art-lover who shares those qualities with both the painter and the poet.
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“The Starry Night” Setting
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The setting of "The Starry Night" is both vivid and a little ambiguous. On the one hand, the speaker might be Van Gogh himself, and the setting the real-life starry night he's about to immortalize in his famous painting. On the other hand, the setting might be the painting: the speaker could be a later viewer standing in front of Van Gogh's "The Starry Night," fascinated by its vision of the world.
Either way, this setting is awe-inspiring and dangerous. Everything the speaker can see, from the trees to the moon, seems to pulse, move, and boil, bursting with life. And that life is more than a little menacing: the speaker imagines the sky as a devouring "serpent" or a "dragon," ready to snap the unwary onlooker up in its jaws. If it did, no one would know: the nearby "town," the only sign of human life, is "silent," and seems so remote that it might as well "not exist."
This is a wild, magical landscape—one in which the speaker is both completely alone and surrounded by menacing energies. But the speaker doesn't mind any of that one bit. The speaker isn't afraid that this "starry starry night" will swallow them up: they long to be devoured.
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Literary and Historical Context of “The Starry Night”
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Literary Context
The American poet Anne Sexton (1928-1974) first published "The Starry Night" in her 1962 collection All My Pretty Ones. Like many of Sexton's poems, "The Starry Night" deals with Sexton's own struggles: she often wrote about her feelings of alienation and her difficulties with her mental health.
The intimacy of much of her work means that Sexton often gets lumped in with the Confessional poets: writers like Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, and Sexton's own friend and mentor W.D. Snodgrass. These poets wrote unapologetically personal and soul-baring poetry, aiming to break the taboos of the uptight 1950s. But while Sexton's poetry is deeply confessional, she never saw confession as her primary artistic purpose. She felt that her great skill was her imagery; while her poems often reflected on her own troubled life, they're also notable for their vividly painted (and often fantastical) characters and landscapes.
Sexton was an acclaimed and important poet even during her lifetime (a reward that few poets enjoy!). She won a 1967 Pulitzer Prize for her book Live or Die, and collected many other honors and acclaims. She remains one of the most influential American poets of the 20th century and is often cited as an inspiration to second-wave feminist writers and thinkers.
Historical Context
In writing an ekphrastic poem in response to Van Gogh's "The Starry Night," Anne Sexton clearly had not just Van Gogh's art, but his mental illness in mind.
Many modern psychologists suspect that Van Gogh suffered from what we'd now call bipolar disorder—a condition that Anne Sexton was herself diagnosed with. Van Gogh was famously tormented and moody, and he spent a lot of time in and out of mental hospitals. He even became good friends with one of his doctors and immortalized him in a famous painting. Tragically, Van Gogh died by suicide in 1890 at the age of only 37, never knowing that he would become one of the world's most beloved painters.
Anne Sexton might well have related to Van Gogh's sad story: her own mental illness was a central feature of her life from the time she was a child. She was repeatedly institutionalized, and wrote about her suffering in collections like To Bedlam and Part Way Back, which takes its title from the name of an ancient and infamous mental hospital in London. And like Van Gogh, she died by suicide.
In choosing to write about Van Gogh and his art, then, Sexton reached out to a fellow sufferer, seeking a connection with another brilliant, unhappy, lonely artist.
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More “The Starry Night” Resources
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External Resources
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Van Gogh's Starry Night — Learn more about the famous painting that inspired this poem.
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A Short Biography — Learn more about Anne Sexton's life and work at the Poetry Foundation.
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An Interview with Sexton — Watch Sexton speak in a 1973 interview.
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The Poem Aloud — Listen to Anne Sexton reading this poem aloud.
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Sexton's Legacy — Read about some recently rediscovered Sexton poems, and learn more about her influence on the world of poetry.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Anne Sexton
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