! Beauty Of The Shining Self

The life of a ‘minor poet’, an amateur, of, say, fifty, a hundred years, ago, and long before that: a lifetime’s love of poetry; and one’s personal contribution, after 25 years, let’s say, might be a ‘slim volume’ of verse, distillation of that lifetime, printed elegantly at one’ s own expense in 200 copies, maybe, a few sent to literary journals for, perhaps, a few lines of review; and some letters of appreciative response from friends to whom one sent the poems; ‘the quintessence of a beautiful soul’, wrote one. today – when ‘beauty’ is no longer thought a virtue in many areas of art – there’s something more important, so some think – a poem on the internet as here can produce a written response so unexpected, so beautifully expressed, that it leaves no doubt of what the sages say: that there are two aspects of that which we call ‘beauty’: the fine, yet temporary, one which may be studied, learnt – a lifetime, say, curating or collecting Chinese ceramics of the finest period, when making or owning such a pot was like a spiritual act of devotion – and that beauty which is eternal – that of the human self, shining in all its glory from a human being so roused, beauty that melts one’s heart and brings one to one’s knees all inwardly; known, reflected; entirely of itself; and which can be found from time to time blazing from the screen here, from persons known or unknown, within a ‘Comments’ box… a beauty, surely, greater by far than any poem, revealing all the riches of the human heart without any inhibition; and yet, given cause to blaze out thus by this form of words called poetry.