A Thing of Beauty’ by John Keats A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness; but still will keep A bower quiet for us, and a sleep Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing. Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing A flowery band to bind us to the earth, Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth Of noble natures, of the gloomy days, Of all the unhealthy and o’er-darkened ways Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all, Some shape of beauty moves away the pall From our dark spirits. Analysis by Christopher Nield Beauty belongs to us all. As a concept, we may never be able to pin it down exactly, yet we all recognize and respond instinctively to each individual beautiful thing that takes our fancy: perhaps a classical statue, a contemporary painting, or a cute face in a coffee shop window. Each brings us to a pause, a moment in which we lose and find ourselves again: delighted, disturbed and different than before. Won’t the statue eventually smash, the painting fade, the face wrinkle and warp? Yes, but beauty leaves behind an indelible mark. Its loveliness grows, not in the physical world, but in the mind. Keats picks the image of a bower, a shelter of twining branches, to portray this inner shrine. This is a quiet-zone, a sacred space. Like hypnotherapy, poetry teaches us to retreat for a few minutes into an imaginary, ideal landscape to relax and recharge. Against a backdrop of raucous, bad-tempered urban chatter, we need this bower now more than ever. A place where we are uninterrupted by the thousand unnatural bleeps of modern technology. Where we take a break from trying to multi-task an endlessly multiplying mountain of responsibilities. Where we can rest, our physical and mental health restored. This is art as nurture: what develops our brain and moral being. What inspires us to perfect our environment and make the ideal a reality for ourselves and future generations. Things of beauty aren’t necessarily masterpieces like the Sistine Chapel or the Mona Lisa. They include a flower arrangement, a stylish watch, even the way we lay the table. Each is an attempt to create order from chaos, and to craft that order into a congenial, pleasurable design. For Keats, each is a “flowery band” of homage to the earth, our origin, home and grave; and such an image is a reminder of the fragility of whatever we achieve. Thus beauty leads not to inertia but a constant battle to guard our well-being against sadness, treachery and those days that just go wrong. In his triumphant “yes,” Keats defies the accusation that his belief in beauty’s immortality is sentimental. He affirms that it always lifts the pall—the funeral cover—from the coffin of confused misery to provide some light for humanity’s anxious quest for meaning. His words are gently, mesmerically, persuasive. They lilt in similarly syllabled lines to give us a sense of flexible, rhythmic order: a subliminal, maybe spiritual, syntax beneath the slippery surface of sensual appearances. This order is reinforced by rhyming couplets that form the poem into elegant bands. Flowery yes, but neither fanciful nor frivolous. In a year that began with the Asian tsunami and has brought the hell in New Orleans and Pakistan into our living rooms, we are painfully aware of how disaster can blast our existence into nothingness. No-one is safe from the pulverizing forces of nature, or the random quirks of fate that turn joy to tragedy. But the will to beautify, to adorn, to shape a concrete pleasing something from ugliness, stupidity and mess goes on: a life-enhancing, perhaps even life-defining, artistic impulse that each of us has the power to express. John Keats (1795-1821), English lyric poet and archetypal Romantic, whose most famous poems include “Ode to Autumn” and “Ode to a Grecian Urn.” He died of tuberculosis in Rome at the age of 25. “A Thing of Beauty” is taken from his poem “Endymion.” Christopher Nield is a poet and freelance writer living in London.
Posted on: Fri, 20 Sep 2013 04:37:52 +0000
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