POETRY ESSAY

2006B Poem: “To Paint a Water Lily” (Ted Hughes)
Prompt: Read the following poem carefully. Then write an essay discussing how the poet uses
literary techniques to reveal the speaker’s attitudes toward nature and the artist’s task.


Ted Hughes possesses a Darwinian, artistic admiration for nature in his poem, "To Paint a Water Lily."  Using an imperative, paradoxical approach, Hughes personifies the dragonfly and the water lily while teaching his audience how to paint the nature of the pond.  To romanticize nature's beauty even more, he shifts the tone of the poem into a metaphorically brutal analogy of a battlefield that helps him to convey nature's beauty in two lights.

Personification was the earliest utilization of Hughes's literary sine qua nons.  To bring about the beauty of the dragonfly, he personified the bug to be a lady.  "Lady" being an actual connotation for the word "dragonfly," Hughes allowed himself to easily point out his true admiration for nature, because if a man in reality were to compare a beautiful woman to anything, the essence of beauty radiates throughout the analogy.  Hughes then goes on to describe the "two minds of this lady" - the Darwinian mindset where the fly hunts swiftly to survive, and the calm mindset where it settles in the air for a passersby to capture a glimpse of its still beauty.  The latter is what Hughes tries to capture and teach to his audience.  To paint the dragonfly, one must not only respect its rainbow, metallic arts in its stillness, but one must also capture its warrior-like attributes and killer instincts that take effect in the battlefield above the pond, as indicated by the "death cries" and "battle shouts."

After establishing the background of the painting that Hughes paints with his words, he moves on to the foreground where the pond is every so still.  The second lady of the piece, being the water lily, takes on a much more serene and harmonic personality.  After moving from an imperative, harsh tone, Hughes uses an imperative, sensitive tone toward the water lily.  No matter how beautiful the dragonfly's brutality may be, its horrors could not touch the water lily's elegance according to Hughes.  

The shifting diversity of tone, the personification of the two ladies, and the metaphor of the battlefield all depict Hughes's aspect of the pond.  Like many things in life, there are two points of view to everything - one of harsh realism and the other of beauty.  Hughes gives instruction on how to paint the two aspects in his poem, but never did he mention what types of paint brushes or colors to use.  Like how Hughes leaves it up to the painter to decide which path to take when painting the water lily, it is up to us to also decide which point of view on life we choose to see - beauty or beast.