In my opinion, the most beautiful poetry in the world comes from the poem Paradise Lost, by John Milton. Basically, Paradise Lost is the story of the fall of Satan and the fall of Man. An epic poem published in 1667, it is crazy long and extremely hard to read. However, I love it. I love how Milton imagines the conversations and emotions of heavenly beings and the first humans. (Forewarning: Paradise Lost is based on biblical recordings, but Milton writes fictionally about the events- these are my thoughts on it. By no means am I for sure correct in my interpretation, or an English major) This is my favorite scene:
“Such Pleasure took the Serpent to behold [ 455 ]
This Flourie Plat, the sweet recess of Eve (The serpent sees Eve for the first time)
Thus earlie, thus alone; her Heav’nly forme
Angelic, but more soft, and Feminine, (She’s entrancing)
Her graceful Innocence, her every Aire
Of gesture or lest action overawd [ 460 ]
His Malice, and with rapine sweet bereav’d
His fierceness of the fierce intent it brought:
That space the Evil one abstracted stood
From his own evil, and for the time remaind
Stupidly good, of enmitie disarm’d, [ 465 ]
Of guile, of hate, of envie, of revenge” (He becomes good, and not evil)
Paradise Lost: Book 9 Lines 455-466
So in this excerpt, Satan is completely taken aback by the beauty of Eve and the beauty of humanity. He is dumbfounded and turns good for a moment. Think about that- the icon, the king of Hell, a fallen angel, turns good for a moment when he sees a human being for the first time. Humans, created in the image of God, are so incredible it made Satan awestruck (wow if we’re just his IMAGE, God must be so awesome). But this makes me think; why do we beat ourselves up, and degrade our bodies and our souls, even though we are made close to God? God made us so incredibly beautiful and important, yet we believe the lies of Satan, and we don’t value ourselves or each other as worthy. Our bodies are perfectly wonderful, and just house our soul, and we shouldn’t get bent up about our worth surrounding our appearance. I mean, in all it is just the carrier for an extremely important being, you (like a meat suitcase! haha). Our bodies are beautiful no matter what because God created you, he knit you together in the womb. God never says once to worry about your appearance or what your body shape is, he calls us to love and serve Him and others to the best of our abilities, and equips us with bodies to do so. Our legs let us be able to walk, our fingers let us grab things and feel different textures and elements, the soles of our feet let us walk across hard and soft ground. If you think about it, bodies are pretty amazing. My youth group leader Ella is pregnant, and was explaining about the mother and baby relationship. It’s so amazing. Basically, if I heard right, when a baby breast feeds, some of the saliva goes back into the mother’s body, and the her body can detect if the baby needs a higher fat content in the milk, or an antibody if he or she is sick, etc..That is so beautiful to me; our bodies are beautiful. It doesn’t matter if ya got chub or no chub, God doesn’t care (you shouldn’t either) as long as you’re doing his work, and taking care of yourself. You are worth more than you think. Always remember you are so beautiful and incredible Satan was awestruck and all the evil left him when he saw a human.
Love, Becca.
