As I’ve previously mentioned, I’m a fan of poems about paintings, and poems about mythological subjects. This Sunday night’s poem scratches both those itches: W. H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts,” about the painting Landscape With the Fall Of Icarus, traditionally attributed to Pieter Breugel the Elder:
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.
This painting inspired more than Auden; William Carlos Williams wrote another poem about it.
Getting back to Auden, those of you who’ve watched the film Four Weddings and a Funeral may also remember Auden’s poem “Funeral Blues,” which figured prominently in one of the film’s most famous scenes.
If you’d like to read more
- Poetry Foundation: A biography of and selected poems by W. H. Auden.
- Internet Archive:
- The Collected Poetry of W. H. Auden. This collection dates from 1945, and so omits Auden’s later poems.
- Bookshop.org:
- Collected Poems of W. H. Auden, by W. H. Auden, edited by Edward Mendelson. This collection contains the final versions of all Auden poems published during his lifetime.
- Selected Poems of W. H. Auden (Expanded), by W. H. Auden, edited by Edward Mendelson. This collection contains earlier (and allegedly preferred) versions of many poems that Auden later revised.