Beauty is a Tragedy

Poetry extends the world. By reading poetry, readers can experience what they can’t experience in reality, that is to say, poetry creates the world beyond the reality, by which I mean the world that is beyond good and evil.

“This was a Poet-It is That

Distills amazingsense

From ordinaryMeanings-

And attar soimmense”

(By Emily Dickson)

This is actually the real reason why so many people are intoxicated with poetry, ancient and modern,home and abroad, the educated and uneducated. When we enter the world of poetry, we find a new self, one that we never knew in reality; one that we can call a secret self; one that depart from the secular world. In the world that poetry creates, a significant boundary between body and soul collapses and we can rest in peace. By peace, I don’t refer to the state without feelings but refer to the state in which we isolate ourselves from the cruelty of the material world. This isolation is crucial and foundational for our souls. Materialism distains our souls and the burden under which we struggle to shoulder crook our souls. However, in the world of poetry, we can in relaxation unfold our souls fearlessly, nor worrying about the slings and arrows of the secular world.

Another point when I say that poetry extends the world is that poets extend their own world by creating the world of poetry. Many a person thinks that a man who travels far and near can experience more and create poems in a widened vision or scope but we should remember the instances of Emily Dickson and Milton etc., the former lived almost isolated from the world and the latter, a blind man. A tree is but a tree; but a poet can give more significance to it and extend it. The extended part is the root of poetry, or poetic flavor in Chinese term.

Lu Xun says that the so-called tragedy is to smash what’s valuable in life for you to feel. The extreme of beauty implies the extreme of grief.

Li Bai’s poem A Deserted Beauty (《怨情》), to be honest, is another one that is often deciphered wrong. Something that the explanations on the poem have in common is that the poem is just sentimental and grieved because of lovesickness. This kind ofexplanations, personally, narrow the esthetic values of the poem and decipher it superficially.

The poem is a tragedy, with vividness and symbols. It is smashing what’s valuable in life for us the readers to experience. Between the line is the “doctrine” of his philosophy: beauty is a tragedy, and Li Bai himself is a typical instance.

Li Bai took things philosophically all his life but this poem is seemingly quite different in style from the other poems when you cast the first sight on it. We can understand the poet was sometimes sentimental and melancholy, especially when his idea couldn’t be sold to the emperor and became resentful, so he may have written some poems full of his mixed feelings of love and hate. But,regretfully, this poem does not belong to the imagined group.

From the analysis above, we can be safe to say that Li Bai creates a world beyond reality. This means that we can’t appreciate the poem only by confining it to the description of a beauty in lovesickness. Then, what is the world that the poem creates?

In my opinion,this is a world of tragedy. Li Bai, by contrasting beauty and grief, creates a strong atmosphere of tragedy. In the first stanza, the beauty appears like the rising sun which brightens the world of material. When the bead curtain has been rolled up, the world becomes clear and bright. The beauty of the pretty lady is revealed to the world. But the second stanza immediately causes the contrast to the first one: the beauty is in deep grief. The second stanza lay a foundation for the development of the whole poem as it darkens the world that the first creates. The tragedy begins. And the grief deepens when the beauty sobs, which is heartbreaking for readers: to smash what is valuable in life.

The exquisite stanzais the last one that climaxes the poem: love is beautiful while hate is woeful. The atmosphere ,which is created with contrast shocks the readers who would feel painful sinking into the world of the poem. This is just the result of tragedy. It is evident that the poem is not about a beauty in lovesickness but a world in which the readers feel the power of tragedy. It’s the esthetic values of this poem. After reading this poem, that is, experiencing the world of poetry, we begin to cherish what we possess in reality and evaluate what we can experience in reality because the tragedy teaches us a lesson: beauty can be transformed into grief.

So we should think: what is really everlasting? What's your answer? My answer is that the love from Providence.