Enough Beauty

Read this beautiful Yeats poem today A Prayer for My Daughter. Specially loved these lines:

May she be granted beauty, and yet not   

Beauty to make a stranger's eye distraught,   

Or hers before a looking-glass; for such,   

Being made beautiful overmuch,   

Consider beauty a sufficient end,   

Lose natural kindness, and maybe   

The heart-revealing intimacy   

That chooses right, and never find a friend.

It reminded me of something my grandmother used to say of girls and beauty. There is a threshold beyond which it turns into a burden. A very beautiful woman does not end up having a happy home or family, no one man is adequate for her. She becomes an object of art in a sense and there is a presumption of access by many to her. 

That was a her explanation of why celebrities and movie stars often have very difficult married lives if even they have one. There is an optimal level of beauty as Yeats prays for his daughter - its sufficient and not overmuch - that brings all around contentment. If my grandmother is to be believed, such beauty can be cultivated by any woman through kindness, good thoughts and deeds because they turn into physical beauty others can see and appreciate. As a teen-ager I remember found that idea very empowering - there was a path for any woman to attain the level of perfection that it takes to have a good life.