Beauty by Aldus Huxley

Keats tells us that truth is beauty and beauty is truth. Wilde tells us that all art is useless. Huxley shows us that, “Where beauty is worshipped for beauty's sake as a goddess, independent of and superior to morality and philosophy, the most horrible putrefaction is apt to set in. The lives of the aesthetes are the far from edifying commentary on the religion of beauty.” In Beauty, by Huxley we get juxtapositions of these seemingly incongruent ideas. The poem is dense with mythology and imagery and complex ideas that complement and compete with each other, an entire course could be arranged around the themes in the poem. This is why this poem should be included in a survey course of British Literature.

In the opening of the poem we learn about beauty that beauty is a product of labor from troubled waters in this way there is a link to the poem Easter by Yeats, when he says “A terrible beauty is born” The idea of beauty coming from tragic events is the theme of that poem, and here Huxley explores the idea that beauty is something that is created from difficult work and the restless nature of man. Huxley explores the relationship between the physical and the metaphysical that which transcends what we can see, touch, hear, taste, and smell. In this section of the poem it is perhaps hope that is beautiful as the sick and crippled wait for a miracle.

/THERE is a sea somewhere—whether in the lampless crypts of the earth,or among sunlit islands, or that which is an unfathomable and terrifying question between the archipelagos of stars—there is a sea (and perhaps its tides have filled those green transparent pools that glint like eyes in a spring storm cloud) which is for ever troubled and in travail—a bubbling and a heaving up of waters as though for the birth of a fountain. The sick and the crippled lie along the brims in expectation of the miracle. And at last, at last . . . A funnel of white water is twisted up and so stands, straight and still by