By Juliet Pantoulis
“Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are cultivated.”
I disagree with Wilde on this statement as I actually believe the opposite; I think that if someone is only able to find beauty in things that are explicitly beautiful they are not looking deep enough. Only a cultivated eye educated in art is able to find art in everything. Making art of beautiful things may be aesthetically appealing but can often be incredibly surface-level. Exploring the beauty in all things, aesthetic or not, provokes conversation regarding the nature of beauty itself. Many cultivated artists find beauty in death, which is typically a morbid subject but artists romanticize the finite nature of it and explore the implications of death on relationships, love, and religion. In the song In a Week by Hozier, he speaks about love after death through decomposition:
“And they’d find us in a week
When the weather gets hot
After the insects have made their claim
I’d be home with you
I’d be home with you”
Decomposition is an ugly process but he turns the story about his decay into a love song. He uses the lyrics to describe how they will be together past death:
“We lay here for years or for hours
Your hand in my hand
So still and discreet
So long we become the flowers
We’d feed well the land
And worry the sheep”
The writing is almost gothic, going to extremes about love and death to express passion. The notion of loving someone so much that you wish to be with them past death, through the ugly process of decomposition illustrates a deep, all-consuming love. He uses multiple double entendres to sex and death to further express this passion. Love is often spoken about as if it is going to die with death but Hozier contests this belief. Death is painted as peace, a place of rest. He finds the art in the process of decay, the grass, animals, and earth are all alive and part of a whole that they will return to after death. Instead of speaking of heaven as the final resting place he finds peace in the earth, our place of inevitable return. He does not speak of heaven or another afterlife because to lay at rest on earth with his lover is heaven enough. This view of death is not uncommon in many works of art, this song in particular makes me think about Romeo and Juliet (which I find interesting that this was the play used within Picture of Dorien Gray) where two people love each other so much that they both end up dying to be together. The picture of Dorien Gray deals with morbid topics and speaks about things that are not beautiful. Death is a morbid subject but according to Wilde “No artist is ever morbid” so this leads me to question whether Wilde feels death is a morbid topic or if he exempts the topic of death from morbidity.