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| Willy Kriegel “Trüber Tag” |
Still Will I Harvest
Beauty
Still will I harvest beauty where it grows:
In colored fungus and the spotted fog
Surprised on foods forgotten; in ditch and bog
Filmed brilliant with irregular rainbows
Of rust and oil, where half a city throws
Its empty tins; and in some spongy log
Whence headlong leaps the oozy emerald frog.
And a black pupil in the green scum shows.
Her the inhabiter of divers places
Surmising at all doors, I push them all.
Oh, you that fearful of a creaking hinge
Turn back forevermore with craven faces,
I tell you Beauty bears an ultrafringe
Unguessed of you upon her gossamer shawl!
Edna St. Vincent Millay
from The
Penguin Book of the Sonnet, ed. Phillis Levin
This is the challenge we each take
up or shrug off – to learn to see beauty. It sounds abstract, impractical, the
very thing a poet would prescribe (‘poet’ in the negative connotation of that
word – an individual with their head in the clouds, not useful in the ‘real’
world). But it isn’t so. The person who looks for beauty does so from a deep longing
for it, and what’s more – a belief it should be there. Beauty has to be. Do we not know that? Maybe it’s
buried too deep to feel anymore. Beauty has a source, a centre that draws and connects
us.The speaker of this poem feels it. She uses that tell-tale word “still”,
which is another way of saying “even now”, or “in spite of everything to the
contrary”, and then she gives us a list of tainted, poisoned, neglected and
dumped places and things, and delivers this wonderful line – “Surmising at all
doors, I push them all.” It’s a challenge. I imagine her, hand on another door,
looking back at me with scorn, “If this ugliness disheartens you, keeps you
from following, go home, coward.” It’s a challenge. And I want to go with her,
join in her work, see those “unguessed at” mysteries. Beauty is here, and I need to see it - more, I
want to show it to you.
