Welcome to May’s Poem of the Month!
With the re-opening of the Seattle Art Museum, I thought this month I would select a poem written by W.H. Auden at the point that poetry and painting intersect. The poem concerns the scene in Pieter Bruegel’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” (c. 1558).
A little background: In the Greek Myth, Icarus’ father, Daedalus, was an inventor and hated being in exile. Daedalus decided to build wings for himself and his son to escape. As they made their flight across the sky, he warned the boy not to fly too high lest the sun melt the melting the wax holding his artificial wings together. Icarus, carried away with the freedom of his wings, flew too close to the sun, and his wings melted. He fell into the sea and drowned.
Auden’s “Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts” contemplates Bruegel’s interpretation of the scene.
Warmest regards,
Stewart
W.H. Auden
(1907 – 1971)
Musée 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 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.
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by Bruegel, Pieter, c. 1558
(Icarus in the lower right of the painting)
Also see Jack Gilbert’s Flying and Falling – July 2005
