A Question of Aesthetics

Bronze bust of an Akkadian king,
With braided hair and neatly curled beard,
Commanding, hieratic,
A man both real and superhuman,
Whose now-empty eye-sockets
Once glowed with precious stones.

A miniature limestone torso
From Harappa, a male dancer,
With the soft warm swelling
Of young flesh; convex planes merge
Perfectly into one another,
Designed to be admired
From multiple viewpoints;
Sinuous tribhanga pose,
With a gentle diagonal twist
Catching the rhythm of a dance.

White lekythos from fifth-century Athens;
Grievously elegant, once replete with oil
To cleanse and anoint a dead body
And accompany the deceased;
It was buried with an Athenian soldier
Who fell in the Peloponnesian War, -
It shows two figures, friends
Or relations, standing on either side
Of a soldier seated before his tomb
With eyes open to catch the last lingering sight
Of life, as he dies, so simply, meekly,
Without heroic gestures or loud mourning,
He confronts death with resolution
And regret, as love of life counterbalances
The grim knowledge of sorrow.
Concise and skilful,
The painter’s hand has worked
Hope and love into the requiem:
A few brief lines indicate a figure,
Two or three slight brushstrokes
Give emotion to the face.

A ru ware vase from Song Dynasty China,
Pure form and cool jade texture
Of porcelain, serene as death itself,
Greenblue egg of the cosmos,
Luminous and impeccable
As any work of human hands can be.
It can but engender endless poetry
And questions through a lifetime,
Finding no answer, yet following
The imperative of beauty.

Li Cheng’s A Solitary Temple Amid Clearing Peaks,
Black ink on silk scroll,
Ascending and receding
Into distant mists and silhouettes;
The invited eye may wander
With the tiny pilgrim in the foreground,
To climb up among the autumn trees
To the temple and scan the void,
Held to the surface of life
By brushstrokes so delicate and deft
And brooding dabs of ink.

An album leaf from twelfth- century Japan
Inscribed with a poem:
Hiragana flowing over the paper
With the grace of a ballerina,
On coloured paper lit with silver
And gold, the ground
Merging with the calligraphy
In one exquisite music,
Like primeval insects trapped
In amber, ephemeral-eternal.

Inside Amiens Cathedral,
Long fine upward lines effloresce
In the heights,transformed
Into Gothic arches,weaving
Immense space into stone dream;
No earthly power can hinder the eye’s
Wild flight, and fiery propulsion
Along the joyous arches’ parade;
Precarious equilibrium
Revels in its own tension,
Tricked together by taut lines.