Not For Me A Beautiful Woman Poem by Martin McLean

Not For Me A Beautiful Woman

Rating: 5.0


On the sitting room wall when I was a child
Was a reproduction of the Vermeer
'The Girl with the Pearl Earring'- by then
Not popularised in film and novel.
She stared at me sadly, reproachfully
In my mother's absence. Her eyes followed
Everywhere- the substitute enforcer.

Conventional beauty for me became
An agency of control. Socrates'
Goal: 'The good, the true and the beautiful'
Was perverted into the control speak
Of that lovely tyrant. You must be good
And true. My perfection insists on it.

My unwitting rejection came when
My mother asked to take a photo
Of a roofless, dilapidated wreck
Of a house in our area to support
Her demand for complete demolition.

The returning prints brought exasperation.
'You have made it look beautiful' she moaned.
Of course I had. Beauty for me was not
Aristotelian symetry but
Anarchy and chaos. And the freedom
To see as beautiful what others saw
As ugly.

POET'S NOTES ABOUT THE POEM
I set a competition on a web site for a poem about beauty in relation to goodness and truth and wrote this as an exemplar
COMMENTS OF THE POEM
Danny Draper 24 October 2013

This is a fine piece with wit and analogy in fine measure with sufficient of the ancients to be worldly but not forced. The culture and tone of the first and last stanzas won it for me.

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Karen Sinclair 23 October 2013

Very clever and intricate piece which I believe I can grasp. The beautiful lady gazing almost angelic with a scorn. She gave you the confidence to decide what you saw as beautiful. Right enjoyable write. Tyvm. Karen.

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