In “To Paint a Water Lily,” the narrator analyzes the multiple layers of nature by conveying the complexity of the task that is painting such a living energy. The artist observes in nature a myriad of bustling and action that hides behind, and coexists with the water lily’s beautiful tranquility. Ted Hughes describes, with admiration, this scene and the task of capturing it through the use of language, imagery, and metaphor.
Despite the poem’s title and the poet’s attempting to give advice to a painter, the lack of painting materials is apparent. Hughes uses language to convey what will materialize on the painter’s canvas. The “green level of lily leaves roofs the pond’s chamber and paves,” says Hughes. The water lily is to be the arena in which the entire energy of nature will dance upon. The leaves cover and provide setting for the action taking place in the pond. The “flies” and the “air’s dragonfly” zoom about silently shouting their “death-cries everywhere hereabouts.” The interesting paradox of silent cries gives a certain level of depth to the insect life as well. This 3-D imagery is the manifestation of the poet’s admiration for nature’s complexity and the complexity that the water lily provides. The language Hughes uses personifies nature as well. Nature becomes a woman with “two faces,” those of which being the mentioned viewable and hidden worlds of the pond.
The extended metaphor of nature as a woman is an elegant and extremely effective representation of the elaborateness the pond setting yields and what the artist must capture. As the famous art work of Leonardo Da Vinci, the Mona Lisa, provides a tranquil and relatively plain young face of woman on which numerous, and indecipherable emotions contort upon, so to the painting of the water lily must reflect the emotions of the nature it synchronizes with. In addition to the emotions a woman yields, she