Interactive Literature Selections The Starry Night

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The Starry Night

The Starry Night

Anne Sexton Houghton Mifflin Company. "The Starry Night" from All My Pretty Ones by Anne Sexton. Copyright © 1962 by Anne Sexton, copyright renewed 1990 by Linda G. Sexton. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Co. All rights reserved.

During Reading Strategy
Use What You Know

	That does not keep me from having a terrible
	need of—shall I say the word—religion.
	Then I go out at night to paint the stars.
		—Vincent van Gogh¹
		in a letter to his brother

	The town does not exist
	except where one black-haired tree slips
	up like a drowned woman into the hot sky.
	The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars.
5	Oh starry starry night! This is how
	I want to die.

	It moves. They are all alive.
	Even the moon bulges in its orange irons
	to push children, like a god, from its eye.
10	The old unseen serpent swallows up the stars.
	Oh starry starry night! This is how
	I want to die:

Guided Reading Question 1
To what is the tree compared?
Click to answer


	into that rushing beast of the night,
	sucked up by that great dragon, to split
15	from my life with no flag,
	no belly,
	no cry.

Guided Reading Question 2
What is the “rushing beast”?
Click to answer

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