Beauty's nothing but the start of terror

In my home town, in field on a slight rise, there stands what little remains of a castle originally built in 1490. The castle was demolished after its garrison surrendered to Oliver Cromwell's forces in 1645, during the English Civil War. The stones of the castle live on in the farmhouses and parts of the town they were used to construct.

All that remains of the castle is the lower part of one of its four towers. It was an exciting place to play as kids.

There were, probably still are, stories of the castle being haunted. We didn't allow such ghost stories to stop us from risking the ire of the local farmer though, especially after we heard there was supposed to be treasure buried in the dungeons.

One summer's day, back in the late 60s, my elder brother and I were on treasure hunting duties but we'd stopped to take a rest. In a hole - we always called it a window - in the tower wall my brother noticed a boy standing. As I noticed my brother staring, I looked up and saw the boy who could have been around my own age of 8 or 9. The thing about him that was instantly noticeable was his colouring; he was white. And I don't mean Caucasian.

Multiculturalism and ethnic diversity hadn't arrived in my part of North West England back then. The whole town was Caucasian.

When I say the boy was white I mean literally - hair, skin, clothes, all one shade of brilliant white.

And then he disappeared!

In the middle of an English summer day, in the middle of an open field, he was gone.

Strangely, neither my brother nor I, to this day, believe in ghosts.

I don't know if this is a contradiction, but I do believe that there are people who are able to intuit, perceive or understand things most of us are blithely unaware of. I also believe that places live and breathe their histories. There are many things in life that demand belief rather than explanation.

'Elegy' is a ghost story with a bad ending. It's almost like the first two thirds were written and left to percolate and then hurriedly finished the night before the deadline.

By contrast, the elegy is an ancient poetic form usually in memory of a person who has died. That most famous of American poems, "O Captain, My Captain", by Walt Whitman, is an elegy in memory of Abraham Lincoln.

The traditional elegy expresses three stages of loss: lament, praise and consolation. (cf. Elegy: Poetic Form)

Of course, modern versions of traditional forms often break with the very nature of what makes a thing traditional. Thus, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote some of the most beautiful poetry in his 'Duino Elegies', more concerned with a sense of existential loss than of the death of an individual. Allow me the indulgence of the opening of the First Elegy:

And if I cried, who'd listen to me in those angelic

orders? Even if one of them suddenly held me

to his heart, I'd vanish in his overwhelming

presence. Because beauty's nothing

but the start of terror we can hardly bear,

and we adore it because of the serene scorn

it could kill us with. Every angel's terrifying. (trans. A. Poulin, Jr)

While there is little to praise and even less in which to find consolation, 'Elegy' certainly asks us to lament the brutal and unnecessary deaths of these young women. We should lament that we have built for ourselves a culture that breeds creatures like Nurse Innes. We should lament that it is possible to have life taken so brutally away for no reason other than being young and female. We should lament for our culpability 'On the Turning Away'.

Allegedly we worship beauty in our modern world, what with celebrities and body shaming. Personally, I think Rilke had it right: "beauty's nothing but the start of terror we can hardly bear, and we adore it because of the serene scorn it could kill us with."