Be beautiful, and you will see the world beautiful.

Beauty here suggests an inner disposition: openness, kindness and sensitivity change how the world is perceived. The line proposes a different way of looking, without denying that real suffering exists.

The verse is the refrain of “Philosophy of Life”. Abu Madi ends the poem with it, after the call that also opens it: “O you who complain, though nothing ails you.” The whole poem addresses this “complainer” who imagines he is ill, reminding him that the bird sings though its life is “part of a year”, that he belongs “to the earth first and last, whether he was a king or a humble slave”, and that “there is no immortality under the sky for any living thing”. Then the poet declares: “We did not come into life to be wretched; so, people of reason, give your minds rest.” Before the close come paired commands: be a nightingale that sings, not a crow chasing worms; a brook watering the fields, not a vessel confining the water; a breeze at dawn, not a scorching wind; a star at night, not darkness.

Iliya Abu Madi, born in Lebanon in 1890, worked as a young man in Alexandria before emigrating to the United States, joining the Pen League in New York with Gibran Khalil Gibran and Mikhail Naimy. This poem, like “Smile”, expresses the optimism for which his poetry is famous.

The second hemistich has become a common maxim: beauty lies in the eye of the beholder before it lies in things, and whoever betters his own soul sees the world in its image.

Philosophy of Life, refrain of the poem

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