2: Auden Paints a Poem
W. H. Auden
'Musee des Beaux Arts'
'Musee des Beaux Arts'
Poem written 1938
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.
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.
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.
Shifting gears into the written arts, with a poem written by the English-American Auden after he visited the Belgium museum the poem is named after, which houses the Icarus painting. (FWIW, it's actually thought that there are an additional two Bruegel paintings from that museum that fed this poem, and Wikipedia actually has a pretty good write-up here if you're interested in that.)
So this is a pretty sympathetic sort of poem. In the first bit, Auden dwells mainly on how tragedy exists always within the context of the rest of the world, always going on about its business. Life leads to death which gives way to life, suffering always just a piece of the picture...and there seems to be some relief in that, the idea that no matter how bad things get normal life will still rise back up and take over. (Plus, the humor in the Bruegel painting seems to briefly get its equivalent here, in the dogs getting on with their doggy life and the horse backing up to a tree to scratch its innocent behind1.)
In the second stanza, we get the focus specifically on Bruegel's 'The Fall of Icarus'2, where the sympathy ratchets up a notch and that maybe-relief at unstoppable normalcy sours into something more like ironical disgust. For one thing, we get Icarus as a fully tragic figure: his fall is described with words like 'disaster' and 'foresaken', while 'white legs' emphasizes his youth, repeated in calling him 'a boy falling out of the sky'. There's one use of 'failure', but this seems to be referring to the mechanical failure Icarus experienced in flight — so yeah, doesn't actually seem to be one mention of the part in the original story where Icarus' death was his own dumb fault, so that's nice of Auden.
And who ignores this tragic death? 'Everything turns away quite leisurely', but specifically, first it's the ploughman, who 'may' have heard. Then it's the sun, reflecting a natural world with no choice but to keep on with its own rhythms. And then the one which seems to get to Auden the most, the 'expensive delicate ship' that 'must have seen' but 'had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on'.
If the first part of the poem suggests that it's just 'the human position' of suffering and death to exist all tangled up with life, the second part makes us wonder whether Icarus perhaps didn't even have to die in this version. The 'expensive delicate ship' could maybe have saved him, and if it didn't was it choice or human nature (or can they actually be separated?) that the captain and crew chose to stick to their own business?
In any case, there is definite anger in the way the end of this poem is framed, with some rich man's vessel sailing sedately away from a drowning boy. This is partly a general-human-empathy anger, but it gets amplified here because artists (which would definitely include poets, the mopey things) have a long-standing tendency of identifying with Icarus. If you imagine yourself as Icarus (or at least if you treat Icarus as someone whose general position lots of people could find themselves in), then of course this whole situation is terrible. If, for example, you're someone who sees in this young man's upward flight a metaphor for your own soaring ambitions, then the idea that your own eventual passing (no matter how 'amazing') will go completely ignored would be...well, something like your worst fear, really.
So in sum, good thoughts on the general nature of suffering, pretty hmmmm-maybe-biased portrayal of Icarus. Not that that matters.
NOTES:
1. There are a shocking number of horse butts in art history of all stripes, and many actually play a pretty important compositional role. I don't have a point with that, but there you go.
2. If you want your big word for the day, it's 'ekphrastic', as in ekphrastic poetry (or writing generally). 'Ekphrasis' is Greek for 'description', and 'ekphrastic' labels written works in which the writer/poet vividly describes a scene or, more commonly, a work of art. When describing artworks, as with Auden's poem above the original work is usually used as a jumping-off point for expanding on certain themes.
2. If you want your big word for the day, it's 'ekphrastic', as in ekphrastic poetry (or writing generally). 'Ekphrasis' is Greek for 'description', and 'ekphrastic' labels written works in which the writer/poet vividly describes a scene or, more commonly, a work of art. When describing artworks, as with Auden's poem above the original work is usually used as a jumping-off point for expanding on certain themes.