Vox Populi
A Public Sphere for Poetry, Politics, and Nature. Over 15,000 daily subscribers. Over 6,000 archived posts.
Audio: ‘Musee de Beaux Arts’ read by W.H. Auden
.
Musee 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 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.
.
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (ca. 1525–1569), Oil-tempera, 29 inches x 44 inches. Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels.
Vox Populi 
Reblogged this on O LADO ESCURO DA LUA.
LikeLike
Very nice work with the visuals and the reading. The torturer’s horse rubbing its behind…
LikeLiked by 1 person