"Fairest and best adorned is she Whose clothing is humility"
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Montgomery’s line flatters humility by staging it as fashion, a clever bait-and-switch that tells you as much about his moral project as his taste for lyrical polish. “Fairest and best adorned” sounds like the vocabulary of courtship and display: beauty assessed, ornament admired, the social world watching. Then the pivot: the finest “clothing” isn’t silk or jewelry but a virtue that refuses to compete on those terms. The intent is didactic, but it works because it doesn’t wag a finger; it seduces with aesthetics before smuggling in a rebuke of aesthetics.
The subtext is quietly disciplinary. By gendering the subject as “she,” Montgomery invokes a familiar 19th-century ideal of feminine goodness: modest, self-effacing, morally decorative in the safest way. Humility becomes not just an inner posture but an outward “garment,” something performed legibly to others. That’s the tension the couplet exploits: humility is praised as an escape from vanity, yet it’s still framed as the ultimate adornment - a superior way to win the beauty contest without seeming to enter it.
Context sharpens the message. Montgomery, a religiously inflected poet writing in an era of evangelical moral seriousness and expanding consumer display, is negotiating a culture where status is increasingly purchased and shown. The line offers a compromise: you can participate in the language of elegance, but only if the elegance points away from itself. It’s an ethic tailored for public life: appear “best adorned” by advertising that you’re not advertising.
The subtext is quietly disciplinary. By gendering the subject as “she,” Montgomery invokes a familiar 19th-century ideal of feminine goodness: modest, self-effacing, morally decorative in the safest way. Humility becomes not just an inner posture but an outward “garment,” something performed legibly to others. That’s the tension the couplet exploits: humility is praised as an escape from vanity, yet it’s still framed as the ultimate adornment - a superior way to win the beauty contest without seeming to enter it.
Context sharpens the message. Montgomery, a religiously inflected poet writing in an era of evangelical moral seriousness and expanding consumer display, is negotiating a culture where status is increasingly purchased and shown. The line offers a compromise: you can participate in the language of elegance, but only if the elegance points away from itself. It’s an ethic tailored for public life: appear “best adorned” by advertising that you’re not advertising.
Quote Details
| Topic | Humility |
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