Whose Is Beauty?

Who owns beauty, beauty shared?

Museums, or collectors’ wares?

The galleries who sell, or where

The artist pleads his case to show?

Beauty, who has made you fair?

The painter, or the brush and paint?

The mother and the father whose

Connubial bliss has thence accrued

The spark divine of beautiful truth?

Or was it she so pictured there,

The damsel and her lovely hair?

Whose is beauty? Whose the chair

Of jurisprudence in this case?

Have we paid enough for that?

The beauty that the eye beholds

Belongs inside the last to know: 

The audience imagines that

All beauty is a matter of fact. 

John Sevcik