To Paint A Water Lily Essay

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In a painting, an artist can insinuate a large array of emotions and tones in a painting, even several at once. After all, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” To demonstrate this point quite literally, poet Ted Hughes, in his poem titled “To Paint a Water Lily,” features a speaker who describes the action going on in a painting of pond featuring a prominent water lily. Through the contrast of the lily and its surroundings, the poet reveals his attitude towards nature as a chaotic and ominous force, which is magnified by the artist’s depiction of the lily as an indomitable element of the maelstrom that is nature.
Although the title clearly gives it away, the poem begins with no mention of the fact that the speaker is looking at a painting; consequently, Hughes takes advantage of this by …show more content…
To illustrate this point, the speaker describes the water lily as a “long-necked lily-flower” (22) that is “trembling hardly at all” (24). The water lily is not concerned about the beasts and the battles around it. This further amplifies the already exaggerated imagery of the “chaos” going on in the water lily’s habitat.
By contrasting of the water lily and its surroundings, the speaker reveals that he/she sees nature as a chaotic and ominous force, which is magnified by the artist’s depiction of the lily as an indomitable element of the maelstrom that is nature. The vivid imagery that Hughes provides not only gives the reader a good idea of what the picture looks like, but also immerses the reader into the actual setting of the painting. Consequently, the imagery that Hughes provides of the lily juxtaposes the turmoil around it, and the reader quickly realizes that this is the artist’s task as a well.
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