Musée des Beaux Arts – Wystan Hugh Auden Poem

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  1. About suffering they were never wrong,
  2. The Old Masters: how well they understood
  3. Its human position; how it takes place
  4. While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
  5. How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
  6. For the miraculous birth, there always must be
  7. Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
  8. On a pond at the edge of the wood:
  9. They never forgot
  10. That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
  11. Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
  12. Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
  13. Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
  14. In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
  15. Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
  16. Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
  17. But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
  18. As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
  19. Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
  20. Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
  21. Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.