The power of images and beauty
Here are two poems I like very much. I frequently refer clients to them because they express what I’m often trying to communicate about the value of images and beauty in my work. It is not ultimately analysis that moves us out of our psychological blocks. It’s the image, the aesthetic, itself. Both of these poems describe the apprehension of beauty and end with basically the same (rhetorical) question: “Have you changed your life?”
The Swan
By Mary Oliver
Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river?
Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air –
An armful of white blossoms,
A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned
into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies,
Biting the air with its black beak?
Did you hear it, fluting and whistling
A shrill dark music – like the rain pelting the trees – like a waterfall
Knifing down the black ledges?
And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds –
A white cross streaming across the sky, its feet
Like black leaves, its wings
Like the stretching light of the river?
And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life?
Archaic Torso of Apollo
By Ranier Maria Rilke
We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,
gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.
Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:
would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
There are 1 Comments to "The power of images and beauty"
Gorgeous poems. Mary Oliver never ceases to delight me. “A perfect commotion of silk and linen” – wow. She’s a magician pulling image after image from her hat. Or perhaps an alchemist.