The Starry sky; Mina Loy

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.
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