the beautiful changes

Morna Rhys

The Beautiful Changes

One wading a Fall meadow finds on all sides

The Queen Anne’s Lace lying like lilies

On water; it glides

So from the walker, it turns

Dry grass to a lake, as the slightest shade of you

Valleys my mind in fabulous blue Lucernes.

The beautiful changes as a forest is changed

By a chameleon’s tuning his skin to it;

As a mantis, arranged

On a green leaf, grows

Into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves

Any greenness is deeper than anyone knows.

Your hands hold roses always in a way that says

They are not only yours; the beautiful changes

In such kind ways,

Wishing ever to sunder

Things and things’ selves for a second finding, to lose

For a moment all that it touches back to wonder.

Richard Wilbur

“The beautiful changes”.  Such an intertwining of meaning! (Like the twisting of many threads into one.) Is it saying that changes are beautiful, or that that change is what makes for beauty, or that beauty changes us - or all of those things in turn? I don't grasp this poem fully or even half-ly, but I like it. (For one thing, Queen Anne's Lace is my favourite flower, and walking through a field of them, as I can in this poem, is something I want to do a lot of.) It's the line, "The beautiful changes as a forest is changed/By a chameleon's tuning his skin to it." that makes me pause. Is Wilbur saying that Beauty changes the person (or animal or thing or whatever) who has contact with it? And that if I (a kind of chameleon, yes,  mantis? well, maybe) spend time in the forest (or any beautiful place like it) long enough to become "in tune" with it, not only does it change me, but I change it, "deepen" it, as it were? Is that what he means? And then, "Your hands hold roses always in a way that says they are not only yours." And what is "a second finding"? It sounds like an offering, the way the roses are held, a sharing, or a transferring. And this mention of how the beautiful "sunder(s)/Things and thing's selves for a second finding" - could that be saying that there is a kind of merging that happens with us and the beautiful? A joining and deepening of both otherwise separate things? (This is straining my brain a bit.) 

This is what I take from it, right or wrong:
The lovely image of walking through a field of Queen Ann's Lace and the flowers swaying and moving as I pass.
Your hands full of roses. And the idea that touching or holding or being within beauty changes me. And the crazy thought that I add to it, too, that this wonder I feel is a kind of sharing between myself and Beauty. 
And, of course, that poetry is beautiful, and changes me.