English 1020
Beauty by Tony Hoagland I found this poem to be both sad and uplifting. It tells the story of two sisters, one the butterfly perfectly shaded, finding all the most perfect flowers; the other one, the voyeur, in the background watching and amazed at the flight of the butterfly. The sister tells the story of how beautiful her sister had been until the medication she was taking caused permanent blue stitches that formed across her cheeks. The beautiful sister knowing that her beauty was gone forever, seemed to let it go like it was a burden to her for the longest time. After all those years of watching her sister nurture her beauty, the narrator knew more than anyone else what those tiny blue stitches would cost her sister.
The narrator reflects back to high school years when her sister had perfected the art of being a dumb blond, the way she stood in the breezeway tossing her “bedspring” hair.
“Laughing with that canary trill voice,” her specialty. There were hints of jealousy from these statements. She had a football player for a boyfriend, most likely the star of the team. He would do anything she wanted as you could tell from the “pained expression in his eyes.”
The beautiful sister didn’t date men; she held “auditions,” looking for the one man who had the attention span that would hold her interests. She looked for ten long years, and still was not married. In these times most women were married younger, but these women didn’t have my sister’s agenda. Mapping out her life events, confident that she could control them, she always thought she had the world in the palm of her hand. Then one day it was all over as quickly as the blue stitches on her face appeared. Now, the sister who once traveled in the same inner circle of the other beautiful women in magazines, the one’s that always thought that there beauty would always be there and safe, realized that for her there was no “safe” and there was no “always.”
Her sister watched the girls in the parade that were boarding the floats and reflected back to the moment when she too was boarding those floats and parading down the streets.
How quickly things change. She once cared only for beauty and how everyone saw her, but now and for the rest of her life, it was how inner beauty would carry her though life. There are many emotional, overtones and suggestion of connotation in this poem.
The line, “but I could see her pause inside a moment,” has a whole different meaning to it. It was the time when I thought reality had hit the sister for the first time. She tried to maintain a brave front, but this was the moment when it hit her, emotionally. As we see from the next statement, “As the knowledge spread across her face,” The word “spread,” has some overtones of suggestion to it. As she stood there, the narrator saw her face go flush with the reality that her beauty and what she thought was her identity, was gone. Another line that carried an emotional connotation was, “inhaling and exhaling the perfume of it,” how they, the beautiful women of the inner circle, live and breathe their beauty, like the most expensive air that money can buy. The line, “mulched bodies of their forebears,” has a strong meaning behind it. Mulched bodies represents all the women before them, the new girls that are ascending to the top of the mountain, walking on the beauties that have been and are now
“retired” from the professional ranks of women, who for one reason or another fell from the mountain top. The statement, “sucking the peach out of her lips,” has a few meanings to it. One would be the color of a peach, red and orange when very ripe, just like her lips have always been. The other meaning I could sense was her sucking on her lips, maybe to help from not crying. She couldn’t start crying because if she did, she might never stop. Remember she was a beautiful women and crying wasn’t an emotion that this circle of women had much use for.
Now this also caused her whole face to change, so much so, that it made her nose look a little
“knobby.” It’s funny how one thing opens the door to so many other things. The narrator questions, has her nose always been like this and I had never noticed? It is like this for most beautiful women. They all have flaws, but outsiders never notice them because we are so mesmerized by only the total package and not the individual parts. Looking at the line, “to wave their flags in the parade,” has connotation to it. The word flag means the girl’s hand. This was where the sister started her persona, on top of floats, always looking down at everyone, on top of her mountain of beauty where only the pretty ones lived. They come from all around and strived to become part of this inner circle. No one stays forever; as one falls down the mountain, there is another waiting in line to take their place. The sister was seeing first hand with all these girls; some, maybe only a few, will make it to the top of the peak. There are numerous similes and metaphors that are present in this poem, here are a few that caught my attention. The statement, “ in the bedspring of one of those pale curls,” compares pale curls that look like bedsprings. The narrator says, my sister’s hair just like her looks were perfectly beautiful. Everyone at this time longed to have hair like my sister, the large bedspring like curls that seemed to go on forever. They just added to her natural beauty. The sister, in her eyes, had two distinct parts to her, the exterior and interior side. This is how she,
“perfected the art of being a dumb blonde.” How does one perfect art? Dumb blonde as an art form, absolutely. Are there such women in the world trying to be that dumb blonde stereo type?
The answer as far as the sister was concerned was a resounding yes and she was a master. She used her beauty as a devise to get her all the things she wanted in life. Though looking at her sister from the outside you might think she was this dumb blonde, but she knew otherwise. It was like she was on stage performing to everyone in the world. She was one of the best at it, this dumb blonde act. So good in fact that she admired her for it. The sister went through many boyfriends looking for the perfect guy to marry. It was as though she were “auditioning a series of tall men.” Her sister dated many but never found the one man who could be her equal on stage performing, the guy who would feel the same way about things that she felt, a fellow butterfly that never came to be. I think that the most uplifting part of the poem for me was the ending, when the voyeur, that had watched her beautiful sister lose all that she thought had made her in life, finally realizes her sister was stronger than she could have ever been. Her identity wasn’t her beauty at all; it was more like a burden to her than a useful tool of life, a tool that was no longer needed to help her build the house of her life. I think that everyone goes through events like this in their life, as we get older and how we look at ourselves in the mirror of life. Can we accept the changes that come about with age, accidents and the stresses of everyday life? Can we just as the sister did, stand there for thirty seconds and just toss our head back and move on with life as it is? That, too, would be beautiful.