Musée des Beaux Arts, by WH 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 Breughel'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.

Musée des Beaux Arts
Written in 1938 by WH Auden

We can imagine WH Auden visiting the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique in Brussels, and meditating on the art of Pieter Bruegel (The Elder). He focuses specifically on "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus." Icarus was the son of master craftsman Daedalus, who made wings made of feathers and wax, with which they could both escape prison. Daedalus instructed his son not to fly too close to the sun, but out of sheer delight Icarus did not heed this. The wax melted, and he fell to his death in the sea. Auden's poem is a homage to Breugel's insights into the unflinching ordinariness of everyday life, which for better or for worse speaks to our human lot. It was a masterful painting, rendered masterfully into the art of poetry!