The Fall Of Icarus
By W. H. Auden
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; 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 especially did not 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 Bruegel'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
shown 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.
The full painting of Icarus by Bruegel is in the Links section. It would not fit on this page.
