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.
About Suffering
In that first apartment, dank
Baltimore basement,
I etched Auden’s poem onto
my tablecloth, shaking
the flimsy table,
pressing down in
windowless gloom
before climbing up into
gray sunlight to
join the other would-be poets
in our beige metal classroom
tucked somewhere
I can’t recall -- perhaps
on the edge of that famous university
known mostly for launching
serious doctors.
There, we pursued our
dreadful martyrdom to art,
glorified our untidy lives and
mundane disasters,
thought we could torture our
unsuitable affairs and boring mistakes
into important failures.
We imagined we were cheating
pain into poetry, weaving song
from meaningless suffering.
. . . Now we are old, and nameless, and
at least one of us is a ghost.
Breughel’s green water still hangs
on its museum wall,
and Auden's words echo there
like dust,
multiplied by the internet
to infinity.
Suggested soundtrack: Father John Misty, “Pure Comedy”
