Beauty

One evening, I sat Beauty in my lap.—And I found her bitter.—And I cursed her.

The Stately Homes of England,

Your kneesare a southern breeze—or a gust of snow. Agh! what sort of man was Fragonard?

Your thighs are appletrees whose blossoms touch the sky.

O, beauty, are you not enough? / Why am I crying after love?

Spend all you have for loveliness, / Buy it and never count the cost; / For one white singing hour of peace / Count many a year of strife well lost, / And for a breath of ecstasy / Give all you have been, or could be.

But who is this, what thing of sea or land? Female of sex it seems, That so bedeck’d, ornate, and gay, Comes this way sailing Like a stately ship Of Tarsus, bound for th’ isles Of Javan or Gadire, With all her bravery on, and tackle trim, Sails fill’d, and streamers waving, Courted by all the winds that hold them play; An amber scent of odorous perfume Her harbinger?

Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden.

Beauty is no quality in things themselves. It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them.

Queen rose of the rosebud garden of girls.

 

To see the earth as we now see it, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the unending night—brothers who see now they are truly brothers.

 

Let you hold in mind, girls, that your beauty must pass

 

Come up with me, American love. Kiss these secret stones with me. The torrential silver of the Urubamba makes the pollen fly to its golden cup. The hollow of the bindweed’s maze, the petrified plant, the inflexible garland, soar above the silence of these mountain coffers.

One-woman waterfall, she wears Her slow descent like a long cape And pausing, on the final stair Collects her motions into shape.

 

Love beauty; it is the shadow of God on the universe.

I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of imagination—what the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not.

Do I not deal with angels When her lips I touch.

Every day a wilderness—no shade in sight. Beulah patient among knickknacks, the solarium a rage of light, a grainstorm as her gray cloth brings dark wood to life.

How vain painting is, exciting admiration by its resemblance to things of which we do not admire the originals.

As for everything else, so for mathematical theory: beauty can be perceived but not explained.

This thing you see, a bright-colored deceit, displaying all the many charms of art, with false syllogisms of tint and hue is a cunning deception of the eye…

Just as the sweet-apple reddens on the high branch, high on the highest, and the apple-pickers missed it, or rather did not miss it out, but could not reach it.

Truth isn’t always beauty, but the hunger for it is.

Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.