Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st;
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
The above is perhaps one of the most famous sonnets ever written. William Shakespeare, or as his friends call him, Bill Shakes, wrote that little bad boy in 1609, spurred on by what must have been one hell of a lady. Bill penned this, along with over a hundred other sonnets during his career, some sad, some happy, but none of which quite capture the feeling that this one does. The feeling you get in the presence of true, unadulterated beauty. In this case a woman (most likely, some scholars think good ole' Bill was, perhaps playing for more than one team if you catch my drift).
Bill talks here about how the beauty of the subject of his sonnet cannot ever be dimmed, about how it's beauty shines radiant light all over and affects the weather, and defies time and death. Of course, these things are not literal, merely how Bill feels about how beautiful she is. But apart from those things Bill never really describes the subject of the sonnet. At least not physically.
He doesn't even tell us that her beauty comes from her physical form.
I mean, that's what we all picture, right? Some absolute bombshell, a cross between all the great beauties of all time, Someone who's a little Audrey Hepburn, a dash Kate Upton, a pinch of Marilyn Monroe and a smidgen of Leonardo DiCaprio. The perfect storm of human attractiveness. But he doesn't.
Bill doesn't say she was a buxom blonde, or that she has a body that can stop a train. He doesn't say her skin's clear, or that her waist is small. He doesn't say she's got good eye lashes, a nice caboose or that her lip gloss is poppin. He doesn't describe a thing about this girl other than the way he feels about her.
The greatest, most well known love poem on the planet doesn't mention things like a girl's body weight, her height, wrinkles, love handles or her cheekbones.
Because that's not what's important. Not to Bill.
Nah, my man Bill Shakes comes from a different viewpoint. One of true appreciation. Because Bill (no stranger to love himself) sees the world differently than how a lot of people do. Bill looks at the way this person makes the rest of the world feel like when they're around. How the world looks when she's near and how nothing in the world can ever take that away.
That's real beauty. Not something that can be sold in a box, packaged and marketed to appeal to insecurities. Now I know I'm a little late to the party, International Women's day was a couple days ago now but I think this, if anything is the once sentiment I would want to convey to all the women in my life. The world will try anything to make you feel like you're not good enough. Like you don't matter, or that you're just not beautiful*. Marketing firms and makeup companies will try to convince you that you're always just one more product away from looking like Karen Gillian or Jennifer Lawrence.
Beauty can never be bought from a bottle or achieved through "victory" over some number on a scale. It comes from who you are inside. The complexities of a person are in themselves independently, mind bogglingly, beautiful. The fact that you made it to this life is statistically so insanely unlikely that your presence in the universe is like bolt of lighting in a dark cloudy storm.
But it's when we allow ourselves (men and women) to forget that, that we loose touch with what beauty is. We place it all immediately on the easiest thing to see and too often forget the person underneath.
Now this is not about coming to terms with how one looks or that if one is, objectively a highly physically attractive individual that one has any less worth or beauty to them. All I'm saying is what Bill was saying. I think he went onto say it better than I ever could in his play Love Labours Lost when he said "Beauty is bought by judgement of the eye."
Meaning that beauty truly only exists in the eye of the beholder. Everyone's definition of beauty is different. So never get hung up because you don't match someone else's. Because that kind of person, shouldn't match yours.
RIP William
-Matt
*[Not to say that this is the only trouble women face, that would be itself a belittlement. Not what I intend to convey at all. I'm merely speaking of the one thing that I have seen take it's toll most on the women I've had in my life over the years.]
