'There Are Real Things of Beauty Here'

“Poems are praise, and poems cannot end.”

I was looking for something by the poet and conservative thinker Peter Viereck (1916-2006) when I stumbled on “Independence Day” by William Jay Smith (1918-2015), published in the March 1948 issue of Horizon. The poem is dedicated to “S.H. in his melancholia.” Who that is I don’t know. Smith’s poem struck me as an intelligent pep talk to a friend in need. In that situation, we may be tempted to say something along the lines of “Cheer up! It’s not so bad.” But what if it is? We’ve compounded our friend’s sorrow by minimizing it. Instead, Smith’s speaker points at the bounty of the world and says:

 

“There are real things of beauty

Here; and sorrow is our praise. The day

Is bright, the cloud bank white with gulls.

And while we lie, and watch the ocean roll,

The wind, an Indian paint-brush, sweeps the sky.”

 

As Smith repeats the phrase “There are real things of beauty” three times, once in each stanza, I heard a distant echo. In the closing sentences of The Pleasure of Ruins (1953), Rose Macaulay writes:

 

“Ruin must be a fantasy, veiled by the mind’s dark imaginings: in the objects that we see before us, we get to agree with St. Thomas Aquinas, that quae enim diminutae sunt, hoc ipso turpia sunt [“things that are lacking something are for this reason ugly”], and to feel that, in beauty, wholeness is all.

 

“But such wholesome hankerings are, it seems likely, merely a phase of our fearful and fragmented age.”

 

Macaulay turns Aquinas on his head. Savor the echo of “wholeness” in “wholesome hankerings,” and permit “phase,” “fearful” and “fragmented” to softly fade away.

 

By the way, I found the Viereck essay I was looking for but will save it for another day.