Benign Beauty

"That's the beauty behind the rose"
         --Tom Odell, "Behind The Rose"

Many aspects of the world seem insignificant to the normal eye, but are truly beautiful once admired at a deeper level. Virginia Woolf admires the magnificence of "moths that fly by day" and opens the world of unrecognizable beauty to her audience (Woolf 695). I usually dislike all types of bugs, especially ones that look nasty and big (similarly to the moth written about in her piece). I probably would've had a meager amount of sympathy for the death of that moth if she didn't elaborate on it's sad and simplistic life. She states that the moth is "neither gay like butterflies nor somber like [it's] own species", implying that the day moth is isolated by its differences to other flying insects (Woolf 695). Yet the moth continues to be happy with an "enormous energy" for its simple life (Woolf 696). It's as if the moth tries to be positive even when it is ignored by the rest of the world. This conveys the moth's strength; he "resumes his dancing" even when he is losing hope for ever "zigzagging" through the "pane" to reach a life without neglect (Woolf 696). But shortly after, his strength fades and "helplessness" "roused" his body into a slow death (Woolf 697). He dies because he is unable to conquer his pain from being ignored by many forms of life. I, too, would have ignored the moth's beauty, but Woolf's admiration for the trivial moth portrays that the "best kind of beauty is the kind that is mostly ignored"(Poindexter).