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01/15/2004: "WH Auden poem."
Amdist the shit of daytime TV, I found a programme on poetry. Heard the following being read. It mentions the picture below.
Musée des Beaux Arts - by 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 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.
You can see Icarus' legs sticking out of the water just behind the ship. Here is a bigger example of the picture Auden references. It will take around 30 seconds to load on a 56k modem.
The poem was written in '38; I don't know if it was before or after Germany were 'allowed' to invade Czechoslovakia.
http://www.worldwariihistory.info/on/Munich-Pact.html
