“Perfect”
Perfect
Rev dear Rev: In the popular popsong called "Perfect" by Ed Sheeran he sings of his perfect girl, but what is the point of producing a song about Perfection when after all Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder anyway?
People often ask which is the greatest popsong of the present era, and while there are a few candidates, maybe "Love Story" or "Red" by Taylor Swift, or "Time" by Ariana Grande, or "Don't Speak" or "Cool" by Gwen Stefani, or sometimes, some of the clientele point to the song "Perfect" by Ed Sheeran. This must be my favourite song from this genre of pop music, about Beauty, since for Ed he clearly is falling in love with the experience of falling in love - love in se as a motive force in the universe.
From a Christian point of view though, from the point of view of a more formal and yet personal theology, perfection of Beauty of a feminine kind must surely lie with the Blessed Virgin Mary, the perfect woman. Hence that lovely poem by Hopkins - "The Virgin Mary Compared to the Air We Breathe." She unites both inner Beauty and outer Beauty in the one form and personality. Then there is perfection of objectivity, maybe models and beauties and popstarlets vie for this distinction. Then there is perfection of subjectivity, which is a relative concept and which does admit of the issue of beauty in the eye of the beholder. Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. That is quite evident from the song. So Beauty for the popstar is something distinctive.
In the eyes of a philosopher of Platonic Forms like Aquinas, Beauty is made up of 3 qualities, Claritas, Integritas, and Consonantia, or CIC, something hymned into moderne poetry by the popular Anglo-French poet Robert de Butler, and these three give human beauty its attractiveness, but these are relative qualities that not everybody agrees about in any given subject. Where for the finest poet in the English language, Keats, although the new president Joe Biden says that the finest poets in English are the Irish and Joyce actually develops a theory about Beauty, still for Keats "All truth is Beauty and all Beauty is Truth", so for Keats in his epic poem "Ode to Psyche", then Beauty is such a transcendental thing that it is worthy of a religious feeling, of a devotion in the subject beholder, and his poetry reproduces this emotion very strongly - he hymns Beauty into life. Keats sees himself as a priest of Beauty, much like Joyce in the autobiography Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, - "And I shall be thy priest, and build for thee a fane of floral bowers."
For Keats it is Beauty that brings mankind to his furthest End and his First Origin, to our First Beginning and our Last End. So for him the real font of Beauty lies in God himself, so all our real authentic moments of Beauty and our authentic loves meet there and coalesce in the one grande Ocean of Being which we call Necessary Being, in Beauty as a Transcendental. It is this notion of Beauty that Ed Sheeran is perhaps struggling towards and he attains something like it in one particular version of that song which he sings alongside Andrea Bocelli, the blind operatics virtuoso, when both singers break into an Italian renaissance version of the sentiments of the original English lyrics - sounds just as nice in Italian. A nice job. A perfect job.