Beauty

Beauty moves through these poems as both invitation and rebuke: a heart like a flower waiting to be filled with 'a crystal of tender sympathy,' yet also a fire that climbs till its work is done and a stalk that falls when the flower is gone. The speaker urges her to triumph in her present youth, to leap at once into the truth, rather than wither in doubt and dull opinion. She matters because she is the poem's figure for the soul's own brief, bright chance — the beauty that must be lived, not merely admired, before the stars melt silently away.