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About This Author
My name is Joy, and I love to write.
Why poetry, here? Because poetry uplifts its writer, and if she is lucky enough, her readers, too. Around us, so many objects abound to write about. Once a poet starts with a smallest, most trivial object, he shall discover that his pen will spill out what is most delicate or most majestic hidden inside him. Since the classics sometimes dealt with lofty subjects with a lofty language, a person with poetry in his soul may incline to emulate that. That is understandable. Poetry does that to a person: it enlarges the soul and gives it wings. Yet, to really soar, a poet needs to take off from the ground.
 
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Daily Cascade #1086506 added April 3, 2025 at 11:12am
Restrictions: None
"A Thing of Beauty"
Prompt: "A thing of beauty is a joy forever. It's loveliness increases and it will never pass into nothingness."
Write about this in your Blog entry today.
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I smiled when I saw this quote. "A thing of beauty is a joy forever. It's loveliness increases and it will never pass into nothingness." For it was the catch phrase or rather motto often uttered by our art teacher in school, Miss Blatter (RIP), who said it all the time. That was more than or about 65 years ago, If you ask me, though, everything passes into nothingness, eventually, but I digress.
Coming back to Miss Blatter, she was an old woman, then, and she had taught art in China for thirty years, and she was very strict. If she wanted to tell us something, she'd say, "Pencils down, hands up!" And we were all expected to raise both hands in the air as she spoke.
Nowadays such strictness by a teacher would get the local school district's attention. Not then! In those days, we were the clay the teachers were there to shape and mold us into whatever they wished, and in any old way they wished. Now, while I think of this quote, this bit of memory in itself feels like a thing of beauty.
The quote is from John Keats's poem "Endymion," and it signifies that beauty, whether natural or man-made, is a lasting joy and pleasure, with its loveliness increasing over time. Endymion, in Greek mythology, was a shepherd, whose beauty was of such joy to the moon Goddess, Selene that she requested Zeus to make him immortal.
In fact, so many beautiful things exist in nature to give us the feeling of immortality, such as the sun, the moon, the old trees, the roses and other flowers, the forest, the ocean...but are they really immortal? After all, even our planet is not immortal, and I suspect nothing is.
Still, just about everything in nature can bring smiles to our lips, be it mortal or immortal. If we can only raise our hands up and pay attention, as I and my classmates did in Miss Blatter's art class.
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