Musée 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.
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.
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