A Joy for Ever

As I rode my bike this morning I knew I was experiencing that rare gift: a perfect day. These are the long idyllic days of Vermont, when the sun saunters up the vast parabola and down to the golden hour. When the scent of baking pine needles and an uncut hay field speak, “Summer is forever.” It is all beautiful and I want to store it in my bones for the dark days of winter.

A wise old friend of mine often quotes Keat’s Endymion’s opening lines:

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: 
Its loveliness increases; it will never 
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep 
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep 
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.” That’s a new idea for me. Often beauty has been a sharp pain to me and certainly not an enduring joy.

My friend once asked me about the last line of a sonnet I wrote about spring defeating winter and bringing flowers back to the land. I wrote:

So fleeting are a thousand dainty things
In all our dear and devastating springs.

Why “devastating”?

Beauty and I have a weird relationship. Sometimes it brings deep pain and no joy. Beauty stays beyond arm’s reach. We cannot embrace. Beauty, says my heart at these times, cannot be trusted to stay. A stunning sunset? An orchestra rehearsing of something lush and poignant? A sapphire summer day? They break against the hardness of my heart. Beauty cannot enter. I yearn for it, but I let it pass me by. I am afraid of breaking my heart.

But this poem opened a new way for me. Now beauty has a permanent pathway to my heart. I freely open the doors and windows to it. When I encounter something beautiful, it becomes mine. I own it. I named it beautiful and it belongs to me. It cannot be taken from me. I store it deep in my treasure house and keep it forever. As long as I have memory, it is my memory and memories are the vessels of personhood.

No cynicism can deny the objective pleasure they give me. No bitter outlook on life can blight what I truly treasure. No fear of loss prevents me from giving my heart.

It is a matter of trust, too. I will find beauty again. There will be suffering and loneliness–days of dreary rain or slimy mud when even my soul is stained gray. Some days in late winter I cannot find any beauty at all. That’s when I’ll open the storehouse and remember forward to the days of summer, because they always arrive.

In his song, “I Sit Beside the Fire”, Bilbo tells Frodo in Lothlorien that he has enjoyed his life through the seasons but he knows a spring will arrive one day that he will not be there to see. This is how he finishes:

But all the while I sit and think 
of times there were before,
I listen for returning feet
and voices at the door.

He keeps his heart open to visits with the people he loves. They will come.

For a Christian, there is more: when every beautiful thing is behind us and only gray and pain ahead, we know there is a forever where beauty never fades and joy endures.

Instead of fearing to embrace a beauty that will not last, I now believe every beauty that ever touches my heart is a promise of the beauty found everywhere in the presence of God.