Beauty has the coldest heart

Beauty has the coldest heart, and those charms
That tempt are nothing more than stone’s hard face:
Touch not the cold, the ice-soul only harms
The warm that live their lives in warmer place -

Their warmth would hold the ice, and melt it there,
But beauty’s cold is set, and will not change:
The warm would lose their heat to cold’s cold care
In cold’s cold world which warmth would find most strange.

Pity, perhaps, the beauty’s frozen heart;
Weep, if you can, for cruelty and spite;
Take, if you must, the beauty’s troubled part
And grieve, sincerely, for the beauty’s plight.

Not me: I’ve touched the ice and felt the cold -
Let beauty suffer as it gets old.

Oct. 24th 2001

A sonnet about cold women with hearts of stone, hiding behind beauty. Their cold is too deep for warmer people to change, whilst if you give your heart to a cold person it won’t be looked after. Feel pity for the cold person and their self obsession if you want, but not me – beauty fades with age, and then the former beauty starts to suffer.

  1. 1

    Comment by Steph

    I thought this poem is great.

    Posted on: April 19th, 2009 at 3:22 pm

  2. 2

    Comment by Anonymous

    omg!!! i luv this poem!!! k im doing this report 4 skool and i need 2 pick 2 poems and tell y i like them and this is definetely one of them!!! (+ it was written on my bf’s b-day) :)

    Posted on: November 22nd, 2009 at 1:42 pm

What do you think? Leave a comment!

You can leave a trackback at http://www.richardmacwilliam.com/beauty/trackback/
Comments to this post have this RSS feed