Starry Night by Sexton and The Great Wave by Hokusai

The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate how two poems are similar in theme, the first The Starry Night, by Anne Sexton (1961), and the second The Great Wave: Hokusai, by Donald Finkel. In both of these poems the imagery of nature is greatly relied upon by the poets to convey the theme that human beings are insignificant in comparison to the beauty, awe, and power of nature, but despite this insignificance they remain an integral part of nature overall.

In The Starry Night, Sexton prefaces her work with a quite from Vincent van Gogh, the tortured painter. The quote is extremely significant to Sexton's poem, primarily because it expresses that despite the painter's inability to believe in eternal life, he finds solace and religion in the forces of nature. Despite his reluctance to utter the word religion, which conveys traditional connotations or organized religion, he informs us that his need for spirituality sends him out at night to paint the stars. In Sexton's poem whose title plays off of one of van Gogh's most famous paintings, Starry Night, we see that the author similarly disdains the isolation of human existence but has a vast appreciation for nature. Like van Gogh, nature appears to be all the religion and spirituality the speaker of the poem needs, "The night boils with eleven stars / Oh starry night! This is how / I want to die" (Sexton 1961, 1).

Sexton (1961) uses simile to describe nature, as a "black-haired tree sl

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