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