Musée des Beaux Arts

The Fall of Icarus. Pieter Bruegel the Elder. 1558.

 

Musée des Beaux Arts

W.H. Auden, 1938

 

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.

 

The poem’s name is French for “Museum of Fine Atrs.” Besides the direct reference to Brueghel’s painting of the fall of Icarus, there are references to other paintings by the same artist—”The Census at Bethlehem” (“the miraculous birth,” “children… skating”) and “The Massacre of the Innocents” (“the dreadful martyrdom”).