Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Albert Goldbarth's poem “Human Beauty” explores the tension between the symbolic gestures of art and the profound realities they attempt to address. By juxtaposing poetic representations with their real-life counterparts, Goldbarth delves into the inherent limitations and unique beauty of human expression.

The poem begins with an analogy: “If you write a poem about love ... the love is a bird, the poem is an origami bird.” Here, love, an intense and complex emotion, is symbolized by a bird, representing freedom, fragility, and transcendence. The poem, however, is merely an origami bird, a crafted, delicate, and ultimately static representation of the real thing. This comparison underscores the insufficiency of art to fully capture the essence of what it depicts. The origami bird, while beautiful in its own right, lacks the vitality and movement of a real bird, highlighting the gap between artistic creation and lived experience.

Goldbarth continues with another analogy: “If you write a poem about death ... the death is a terrible fire, the poem is an offering of paper cut-out flames you feed to the fire.” Death, depicted as a consuming and destructive force, is contrasted with the poem’s fragile and symbolic paper flames. The act of offering these paper flames to the actual fire illustrates the futility of trying to encapsulate the magnitude of death through art. Yet, this gesture of offering also speaks to a distinctly human way of grappling with the ineffable through symbolic acts.

The poet acknowledges this “space between our gestures and the power they address,” recognizing the limitations of our artistic expressions. This gap, or “insufficiency,” is an inevitable part of the human condition. Our attempts to represent complex emotions and experiences are always, to some degree, inadequate. However, Goldbarth sees a “kind of beauty, a distinctly human beauty” in these attempts. It is in our striving to bridge this gap, in our continuous efforts to understand and communicate the profound, that we find a unique form of beauty.

The poem culminates with an evocative anecdote: “When a winter storm from out of nowhere hit New York one night in 1892, the crew at a theater was caught unloading props: a box of paper snow for the Christmas scene got dropped and broken open, and that flash of white confetti was lost inside what it was a praise of.” This incident vividly captures the poem’s central theme. The paper snow, a theatrical prop meant to represent real snow, is scattered and mingles with an actual snowstorm. In this moment, the artificial merges with the natural, blurring the lines between representation and reality. The paper snow’s intended role as a mere symbol becomes redundant as it dissolves into the genuine article.

Through this scene, Goldbarth illustrates the poignant beauty of human attempts to replicate and celebrate the world around us, even when those attempts are ultimately absorbed by the very phenomena they seek to emulate. The paper snow, like the origami bird and the paper flames, symbolizes our creative efforts to understand and express the vastness of human experience.

In “Human Beauty,” Albert Goldbarth captures the delicate balance between the limitations of art and its capacity to convey profound truths. The poem celebrates the uniquely human drive to create symbols and metaphors, despite their inherent insufficiencies. It is through these gestures that we engage with the world, finding beauty not in perfection, but in the earnest and imperfect act of expression itself. The poem thus serves as a tribute to the resilience and creativity of the human spirit, always striving to bridge the gap between our inner lives and the external realities they reflect.

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