The Definition of Beauty is

The Definition of Beauty is
That Definition is none—
Of Heaven, easing Analysis,
Since Heaven and He are one.


   -Fr797, J988, Sheet 61, late 1865

This is a short poem, but there is so much one can say about it.

The first two lines are saying something more than just “beauty cannot be defined.” It’s saying that the definition of beauty is lack of definition. To define anything is to attempt to pin it down, which destroys its true beauty. There’s an irony here, because we appear to be attempting to define this poem, but we'll look later at the ways the poem itself defies any definition.

Can you stay open, like a child, to the beauty in the moment without needing to define it? If you can, that's heaven. But this is radical and perhaps it goes against our very nature. I've thought a lot about why we have the incessant need to think and define. Our brains constantly secrete thought. I'm sure this has something to do, evolutionarily, with survival in the wild. If we are always thinking, always worrying, we have a better chance of staying alive in the wilderness. But at what point does this get in the way of our well being? 

I’ve only ever felt this kind of heavenly beauty in certain rare moments when all thought shuts down and I enter into a trance-like state of sensory bliss. It’s very difficult to describe this state precisely because it's a kind of shutting down of description and one must define to describe. 

But before we head into the mystical, which is where I think Dickinson is going, let's look at this poem philosophically. By removing the definition for what counts as beautiful, we find that everything has the potential to be beautiful. Not because everything is beautiful, necessarily, but because nothing is ruled out by definition. If there’s no fixed standard, then beauty arises in relation, not essence. It’s about how you experience, not what you experience.

So a cracked sidewalk, a withered leaf, a moment of grief, all could be beautiful if you aren't working with a checklist. It’s an anti-aesthetic aesthetic.  

But now I want to try to dig even deeper than the philosophical and enter into the realm of the metaphysical. Bear with me here because I'm trying to get down to something ineffable, and therefore my words are wildly insufficient. 

There seems to be me to be a state of pure being, a place in which true beauty exists simply because of absolute ISNESS.

Defined beauty implies a kind of conditionality: this could be beautiful if… But what Dickinson is reaching for, I believe, is unconditional beauty, beauty as a state of pure presence prior to the judgment implicit in thought.

Let’s slow down and sit inside that. 

If definitions disappear, then beauty doesn’t just become possible in all things, all things become beautiful. Not because we choose to see them that way, but because there’s nothing in the way of their being what they are.

This is what Eastern philosophy might call suchness (Tathātā), or the Christian mystics might call the “cloud of unknowing.” In that space, you don’t see beauty, you are in beauty. You are beauty.

Let’s look at the way the form of this poem echoes its content.

The Definition of Beauty is

That Definition is none—

This formal structure of an equation collapses in on itself. What looks like it’s going to deliver clarity ends up producing a kind of absence. Dickinson’s making a definition that erases itself, which is what the poem is about, subverting definition. She uses the grammar of certainty to create uncertainty, and that reflects her subject.

She does something similar with the dash, which functions here as both a closing of the line and an opening to the next line. It creates a gap where meaning both breaks down and spills forward. This echoes how beauty itself works, something that resists closure.

Dickinson also uses ambiguity in this poem to further this idea. In the lines "Of Heaven, easing Analysis, / Since Heaven and He are one,’ the syntax is ambiguous. "Of Heaven" can modify "Beauty" (Beauty is of Heaven), or it could introduce a new clause, (easing analysis is of Heaven.) Same with “easing Analysis.” Is Heaven easing analysis? Or is the absence of definition what eases analysis? It’s structurally unclear, which underlines the point of the poem. Just as Heaven (and beauty) defy straightforward analysis, these lines defy analysis. They resist parsing the same way their subject resists dissection.

The reader is forced to experience the lines rather than decode them. It's like a divine leak, a trick I'm not sure even Shakespeare could've pulled off so well.

What’s so radical in Dickinson's poem here is that she starts with a linguistic paradox. “The definition of Beauty is / That Definition is none—” But that paradox opens into something beyond thought. The poem performs a shift, from the idea of beauty, to the failure of defining it, to the refusal of analysis, to the merging of Heaven and God, to the unspoken reality behind all appearances.

It’s as if she leads you to the edge of thought, and just as you reach for understanding, lets you fall gently into Presence.

      -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

Giovanni Bellini's "St. Francis in the desert." The most beautiful painting in the world?

Notes:


1. The opening structure of this poem is used again in Fr988, but "beauty" is replaced with "melody,"

The Definition of Melody – is
That Definition is none –


2. Check Fr654 out for a deeper dive into Fr797, a poem that says much the same thing, but maybe even more beautifully. It's a favorite.

 
Beauty — be not caused — It Is –
Chase it, and it ceases –
Chase it not, and it abides –

Overtake the Creases

In the Meadow — when the Wind
Runs his fingers thro' it –
Deity will see to it
That You never do it –