Peter Bruegel, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, detail (Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts d
Peter Bruegel, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, detail (Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique)About suffering they were never wrong,The old Masters: how well they understoodIts human position: how it takes placeWhile someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waitingFor the miraculous birth, there always must beChildren who did not specially want it to happen, skatingOn a pond at the edge of the wood:They never forgotThat even the dreadful martyrdom must run its courseAnyhow in a corner, some untidy spotWhere the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horseScratches its innocent behind on a tree.In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns awayQuite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman mayHave heard the splash, the forsaken cry,But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shoneAs it had to on the white legs disappearing into the greenWater, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seenSomething amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.W. H. Auden, Musee des Beaux Arts According to Brueghelwhen Icarus fellit was springa farmer was ploughinghis fieldthe whole pageantryof the year wasawake tinglingnearthe edge of the seaconcernedwith itselfsweating in the sunthat meltedthe wings’ waxunsignificantlyoff the coastthere wasa splash quite unnoticedthis wasIcarus drowning William Carlos Williams, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus -- source link
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