4.1.09

Procrastination Pastime #791 ... look up all your old favorite poetry online and post it on your blog with purloined images


Musée des Beaux Arts

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 Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the plowman 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.

-W.H. Auden

2 commentaires:

Jessica a dit…

Would you rather me use vacation time to visit you in SC or Paris?
I'm just asking. I don't have enough time to do both but could swing the $.

And thanks for the poem, it made my day to read it.

Applecart T. a dit…

yay!

i had forgotten that painting.

and poem. i was all ready to apply my "hey, i think i recognize this, but not from class, at least the period and culture / country." i was not far off.