I discovered Auden in the most trite way possible, the way everyone else did. I liked the movie Four Weddings and a Funeral, and Auden's poem, "Funeral Blues" (which despite its silver screen fame has never stopped being a lovely poem) is featured rather prominently in the funeral scene. In the process of looking for, finding and reading that poem, I happened upon Auden. Perhaps I was aware of him somehow else, but I can't say how, if I was. I feel fairly certain that I didn't study Auden in high school, and I feel even more certain that we didn't read one Auden poem during the poetry class I took in high school. For that matter, I don't think we read him in my poetry class in college. (Both of which I hated, mostly because they forced me to admit to myself that I was no poet, nor would ever be. But I have kept on trying, on and off, even so.) The first time I remember seeing Auden in a textbook, in classroom form, was in Rome, in my mythology class (I'm hazy on the details; it might have been mythology, but it might have been...something else.). In the back of the textbook, there was some sort of index, with modern poems and paintings that went back to mythology for their theme. Eavan Boland's magnificent poem "The Pomegranate" was one of those poems, and we discussed that one in class.
But there was also a little reprint of Brueghel's Icarus (surely you know where I am headed now). Brueghel is an artist I am familiar with, insofar as having had his paintings shown to me at various times in various art segments in elementary school, middle school, high school, and college. I've probably seen at least one of Brueghel's paintings in person, though don't quote me on that, since I'm fairly hazy on what I have seen and haven't, what with the whirlwind museum-going in Europe. But I don't remember seeing Brueghel's Icarus before then. I probably wouldn't have noticed the painting at all but for the poem that was on the facing page.
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 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 out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.WH Auden
I do love this poem.
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