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Musee des Beaux Arts
W.H. Auden, 1907-1973
Reviewed by David Bunch
August 4, 2003
In
Musee des Beaux Arts, W.H. Auden provides an important insight into the
failure of self-absorption. The title of the poem comes from the name of the
famous art museum in France that houses the painting
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
by Pieter Breughel. The painting depicts a beautiful, rural landscape with a man
working in a field and a ship of commerce sailing on a calm and serene sea. Not
far from the ship, a solitary human leg can be seen protruding out of the water
in the bottom right corner. This is Icarus, the mythical figure who used wax
wings to escape, but flew too close to the sun and fell from the sky when they
melted. Auden weaves this striking scene and tragic hero together with other
events, such as the birth of Christ, to give us a glimpse of our human condition
from his vantage point.
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 importune 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.
ninetyandnine.com
© 2003, David Bunch
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Due to his
fear of flying, David Bunch has never tried reaching the sun with wax
wings.
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