W.H. Auden

Musee des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understand
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 reverntly, passionately
waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not especially want it to happen,
skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot

That even the dreadful martydom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy pot
Where the dogs do 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 dsiapperaing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have
seen
Somthing amazing, a boy fallting out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.