Musée Des Beaux Arts
Musée Des Beaux Arts - context Summary
Bruegel's Icarus, 1938
Auden reflects on how painters of the past register human suffering as an ordinary background event rather than a cosmic focus. He contrasts public spectacle and private indifference: great tragedies occur amid everyday routines, unnoticed by those who continue their tasks. Using Bruegel’s depiction of Icarus as a concrete example, the poem argues that life’s routines and practical concerns persist while singular disasters register only fleetingly in the world.
Read Complete AnalysesAbout 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.
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