Poem of the Day: W.H. Auden

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 Brueghel'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 

Auden's wryly observant poem is maybe the most familiar example of poetry as art criticism, and has been widely imitated. Some of the imitations are direct homages to Auden's poem, like Billy Collins's:

Musée des Beaux Arts Revisited 

As far as mental anguish goes, 

the old painters were no fools. 

They understood how the mind, 

the freakiest dungeon in the castle, 

can effortlessly imagine a crab with the face of a priest 

or an end table complete with genitals. 

And they knew that the truly monstrous 

lies not so much in the wildly shocking, 

a skeleton spinning a wheel of fire, say, 

but in the small prosaic touch 

added to a tableau of the hellish, 

the detail at the heart of the horrid.

In Bosch's The Temptation of St. Anthony, 

for instance, how it is not so much 

the boar-faced man in the pea-green dress 

that frightens, but the white mandolin he carries, 

not the hooded corpse in a basket, 

but the way the basket is rigged to hang from a bare branch; 

how, what must have driven St. Anthony 

to the mossy brink of despair 

was not the big, angry-looking fish 

in the central panel, 

the one with the two mouse-like creatures 

conferring on its tail, 

but rather what the fish is wearing: 

a kind of pale orange officer's cape 

and, over that, 

a metal body-helmet secured by silvery wires, 

a sensible buckled chin strap, 

and, yes, the ultimate test of faith -- 

the tiny sword that hangs from the thing, 

that nightmare carp, 

secure in its brown leather scabbard.

--Billy Collins 

I'm sure William Carlos Williams also knew Auden's poem, but he found a particularly musical way to evoke his chosen painting:

The Dance 

In Breughel's great picture, The Kermess, 

the dancers go round, they go round and 

around, the squeal and the blare and the 

tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles 

tipping their bellies (round as the thick-

sided glasses whose wash they impound) 

their hips and their bellies off balance 

to turn them. Kicking and rolling about 

the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those 

shanks must be sound to bear up under such 

rollicking measures, prance as they dance 

in Breughel's great picture, The Kermess.

--William Carlos Williams