THE STARRY SKY

When you first take a look at this picture and read the poem, it may seem as if they did not have anything to do one with each other. The picture I have chosen is quite abstract and one has to guess what he is looking at. But if you pay attention you discover some of the ideas that the poet mentions in her work..

At reading the poem several times I got deeper and deeper into the concepts that Mina Loy was trying to transmit. I see the human shapes in these rocks that, as she says, are made “of human mist”. These human shapes look diffused. Loy calls them “pyramidical survivors” and we see them sitting alone in the middle of the space with their heads shaped as pyramids.

Loy addresses the vast extension of the space as “the austere theatre of the Infinite” and I can imagine that the two figures are the public of the play and “the ghosts of the stars perform the “Presence”. She mentions “the ghosts of the stars” because there are not stars anymore. Their “aged radiance” refers to the tiredness of these stars after having been shining for millions of years. Now they have faded away leaving the space in complete darkness, as we see in the picture. This picture makes me feel cold, alone, sad…

In next stanza her favourite icon appears “the aged radiance of suns and moons” being “moons” a habitual icon of Symbolism and Futurism . Here she clearly shows her attachment to these movements of her time.

She even describes things that I cannot get to imagine such as “the nerves of Heaven flinching from the antennae of the intellect” or “The rays that pierce the nocturnal heart”. These are things that only appear in the poet´s mind, they are something that the poet adds to the picture.

This is not an easy poem because it describes a lot of things that cannot be perceived in the picture. The poet shapes our perception of the picture including details that are not explicit. They are in the poet´s own perception.