Tony Hoagland’s Poem, Beauty - 563 Words

Everyday people stare at billboards, magazine covers, movies, television, or pictures on the Internet of someone or something that they classify as beautiful. Some things people glance over and other things fascinate them. For example, when Farrah Fawcett’s famous picture of her in her red bathing suit came out; many teenage boys hung that picture in their bedrooms. Their idea of Farrah’s beauty was based strictly her outward appearance. In Tony Hoagland’s poem, â€Å"Beauty†, the young girl, decides what beauty truly is. Earlier in this girl’s life, she was obsessed with being beautiful. Her brother sees her â€Å"†¦watching her reflection in the mirror/ sucking in her stomach and standing straight† (7-8) trying to make herself seem more beautiful. After all her vain efforts, â€Å"†¦her time of prettiness/was over, done, finite†. She desperately wanted to believe that she was beautiful again. â€Å"Mind over matter† is a saying someone hears a lot when their brain will not allow them to do something. The reason that this saying gets repeated a lot is because the brain is not easily changed. The girl in the poem â€Å"Beauty† believes with both her heart and brain that â€Å"†¦she would/ never be beautiful again† (4-5). The fact that she has convinced herself into believing that she will never truly be beautiful again because her outward appearance has changed means that all that she thinks beauty only is what one could see when they first look at her. The fifteen-year-old girl in Marisa de los