Seven short essays and a research paper combining two of the essays

4/15/2019 Auden, Musée des Beaux Arts

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Musee des Beaux Arts

W. H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong, The old Masters: how well they understood

Its human position: how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking

dully along; How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Pieter Brueghel, The Fall of Icarus

Oil-tempera, 29 inches x 44 inches. Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels.

See also:

William Carlos Williams' "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus "

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