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Beauty Isn't In The Eye Of The Beholder

"Glory be to God for dappled things –    For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;       For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;    Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;       And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. 
All things counter, original, spare, strange;    Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)       With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:                                 Praise him."
-Gerard Manley Hopkins, Pied Beauty 

           Traditionally, spotlessness, perfection, and unbroken or untainted things are considered beautiful. Shouldn't blemishes be covered up? And shouldn't you pull up the dandelions in your front yard? What about ugly people? Shouldn't they try to perfect themselves and make themselves more presentable? 
             I think Hopkins perfectly shows here that there is beauty in broken and ugly things. Karen Swallow Prior says it's a "Certain kind of beauty that arises only from imperfection- or pain." 
             Bob Dylan has a singularly gruff voice. I have loved it since I was a child listening to him prophesy from the back seat of my dads truck. But somehow, most people who hear him sing recoil. I think this is because our hearts have been attuned to the auto-tuned perfection of modern artist (If they can be referred to as such). In His defense of Dylan's voice, Stephen H. Webb fittingly compares Dylan's voice to scotch. "Both scotch and Dylan are reminders that beauty emerges out of and redeems, rather than opposes and destroys, the ugly. A little bitterness makes the scotch taste sweeter, and wavering off key makes the difference between a good singer and a great performer." 
          So, Glory be to God for ugly things! Glory to Him that we broken and ugly people might show forth His praise. Praise Him. 

Comments

  1. Audrey GrissomMarch 7, 2018 at 3:59 AM

    Amen! It is an interesting thought. Surely it is an important reminder that God would bring forth beauty from ugliness—life from death. I think it requires a certain faith to love what is ugly. What you implicitly say (I think) in loving the ugly is that God will heal the ugliness. Ugliness is also a gift in another way, I think. It is a constant reminder of the beauty of God, almost as much as is its opposite. While earthly beauty gives us a picture of Beauty Himself, earthly ugliness reminds us that our God is perfect (and nothing on earth is).

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. UnknownMarch 7, 2018 at 5:31 AM


      Yes. It reminds me of Orual from Lewises Till We Have Faces.

      Delete
  2. Audrey GrissomMarch 8, 2018 at 6:27 AM

    Can you elaborate?

    ReplyDelete

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