Its Own Excuse for Being

On a late-morning walk today, I encountered this brilliant purple morning-glory, which I usually imagine as a vine twining around a porch post, but instead was in splendid isolation in a neighbor's side-garden. And right away a phrase from Ralph Waldo Emerson's poem The Rhodora popped into my head: "beauty is its own excuse for Being" (capitalization Mr. E's). 

We read The Rhodora early in the year in Mrs. Marion Beardsley's 8th grade Language Arts class at Riverside Junior High School, my first year in Springfield, Vermont. I was kind of in a daze of joy in those early days after moving to Vermont anyway -- you could see mountains from the classroom window! -- so I suspect I was especially primed for Emerson's, pardon the pun, flowery verse. 

I had never forgotten that line in the poem, I believe its most famous, but it had been a long time since I had read it in it entirety, which I went back home and did, being reminded of its full title when I did so: The Rhodora: On Being Asked, Whence is the Flower?

    In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes,
    I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods,
    Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook,
    To please the desert and the sluggish brook.
    The purple petals fallen in the pool
    Made the black water with their beauty gay;
    Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool,
    And court the flower that cheapens his array.
    Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why
    This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,
    Tell them, dear, that, if eyes were made for seeing,
    Then beauty is its own excuse for Being;
    Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose!
    I never thought to ask; I never knew;
    But in my simple ignorance suppose
    The self-same power that brought me there, brought you.

Not only did the poem, and my nerdy love for it, come back to me with shocking familiarity, I find it hard to believe that many middle school English classes would tackle such an old-fashioned work today. (I myself even had to look up the exact definition of whence: "from what place, source, or cause"). But then I think, this happened in 1969, and Mrs. Beardsley might have been, I don't know, in her 50s?, which meant she was likely born in the teens of the last century, so imagining what her own education was like, assigning a group of 12- and 13-year-olds a highbrow classic of the Transcendentalists must not have seemed strange at all.  

Mrs. Beardsley's class had a profound influence on me. We read Romeo and Juliet, my first Shakespeare; Mrs. Beardsley herself encouraged me to pursue writing my own poems, and thanks to this encouragement I began to think of myself as someone who might have a talent for writing.  Without doubt from that day to this the written word has occupied an important place in my life.

Beauty is its own excuse for Being. Over the years, although I only thought of the phrase from time to time, I never forgot Emerson's words and at some deep level they became my mantra. Beauty indeed is its own excuse for being; it needs no explanation, reason, or practical function. Such a belief has fueled my passionate interest in and love for art, poetry, literature, nature, and yes, flowers. 

Out of curiosity, I Googled Mrs. Beardsley, without much success, except for one serendipitous hit: from 1960 to 1961 she was president of the Springfield Garden Club.