"Beauty Is Not in the Eye of the Beholder" ~ The Imaginative Conservative

She has disturbed the complacency of the canvas.
Pulsing paintstrokes and palping pigments
Have birthed her from the beating,
Bleating conscience of the artist.
The heart enchants his hand, thus altérant la réalité. Behold.

I am thunderous veracity cloaked in color
Bolting down conviction on the sense of vision.

Her simplicité, nouveauté, and féminité are gracious.
With tilted head, her beckoning stare ushers you forward
To whisper a graphite truth that ought to be remembered:
La beauté n’est pas dan l’oeil du spectateur.
Once you are indebted, you are able to grow bold.

Perching as an enthroned Athena, I grow impatient
Waiting to bestow my riddle with any mortal venturing near.

Accused of incompleteness and incompetence,
The crucifiers ridicule her hat into a coronet of thorns.
But the idolizers are no better…
Their costumey cajolery burdens the hat with pompous, petty jewelry.
Both ought to be blinded and let their sight be sold.

Again I tell you, it is easier for a blind man to decipher
Muses from monsters than for the sighted to name them.

Only the eyeless are dazzled by the incarnation of her inner spirit:
Hear her blithe laugh through pursed lips; see her bright dance through stoic stance.
All else fades—gradually—into a perplexing paradox that can only be known
In hues of blues and shimmers of warmth.
Her winged annonciation alarms the mind eclipsing evaluation cold.

Fair beauty is sovereign from such foul beholders, I would know.
For I am the masterpiece that inspired master Matisse.

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We hope you will join us in The Imaginative Conservative community. The Imaginative Conservative is an online journal for those who seek the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. We address culture, liberal learning, politics, political economy, literature, the arts and the American Republic in the tradition of Russell Kirk, T.S. Eliot, Edmund Burke, Irving Babbitt, Wilhelm Roepke, Robert Nisbet, Richard Weaver, M.E. Bradford, Eric Voegelin, Christopher Dawson, Paul Elmer More, and other leaders of Imaginative Conservatism. Some conservatives may look at the state of Western culture and the American Republic and see a huge dark cloud which seems ready to unleash a storm that may well wash away what we most treasure of our inherited ways. Others focus on the silver lining which may be found in the next generation of traditional conservatives who have been inspired by Dr. Kirk and his like. We hope that The Imaginative Conservative answers T.S. Eliot’s call to “redeem the time, redeem the dream.” The Imaginative Conservative offers to our families, our communities, and the Republic, a conservatism of hope, grace, charity, gratitude, and prayer.

The featured image is “Woman with a Hat” (1905) by Henri Matisse (1869-1954) and is in the public domain, courtesy of WikiArt.

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