Still Will I Harvest Beauty

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.