Last night’s viewing of Museum Hours inspired me to re-read Auden’s poem Musee des Beaux Arts today:
‘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…’
‘In Brueghel’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 from the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly by.’
CQ
