He is indeed too wary ever to make it. So is the poet. As
comparisons are necessary to him, he will pay a frankly impossible
homage, and compare a woman's face to something too fine, to something it
never could emulate. The Elizabethan lyrist is safe among lilies and
cherries, roses, pearls, and snow. He undertakes the beautiful office of
flattery, and flatters with courage. There is no hidden reproach in the
praise. Pearls and snow suffer, in a sham fight, a mimic defeat that
does them no harm, and no harm comes to the lady's beauty from a
competition so impossible. She never wore a lily or a coral in the
colours of her face, and their beauty is not hers. But here is the
secret: she is compared with a flower because she could not endure to be
compared with a child. That would touch her too nearly. There would be
the human texture and the life like hers, but immeasurably more lovely.
No colour, no surface, no eyes of woman have ever been comparable with
the colour, the surface, and the eyes of childhood. And no poet has ever
run the risk of such a defeat. Why, it is defeat enough for a woman to
have her face, however well-favoured, close to a child's, even if there
is no one by who should be rash enough to approach them still nearer by a
comparison.
This, needless to say, is true of no other kind of beauty than that
beauty of light, colour, and surface to which the Elizabethans referred,
and which suggested their flatteries in disfavour of the lily.
Pages:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25