Ah, yes.

    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 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.

     

     W.H.Auden

    Comments

    This is nice.  

    So it is okay to post others' poems?  

    I like the idea because there are several I would like share and discuss.

     


    I asked Articleman who was OK with it.

    It seems to me to be not that different from the deconstruction discussion of a couple of days ago. i.e. not politics per se  but something that engages the mind. 

    I think the Musee in fact is susceptible to a political analyis of its underlying assumptions about human nature. Or maybe a poem should not mean, but be .Unquote


    OK.  

    I know a poem that is definitely political but also social.  Maybe I will post it.


    Goforit.

     


    I will --- later.   There is another I will do first.

     


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