Author:
jim clark..London..England
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Date Posted: 07:02:39 03/13/03 Thu
Wystan Hugh Auden 1907 - 1973 born in York, England,wrote this poem in response to a painting he had seen in the Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels. Auden visited the museum in 1938 and viewed the painting of " The fall of Icarus" a figure from classical Greek literature who built wings to fly from and foolishly flew too close to the sun melting the wax binding them together and causing him to fall into the sea and drown by artist Brueghel, The poem juxtaposes ordinary events and exraordinary ones, although extraordinary events seem to deflate to everyday ones with his descriptions. Life goes on while a "miraculous birth occurs", but also while "the disaster" of Icarus's death happens....heres the link to the page with the sound file...
http://groups.msn.com/acousticmusiciansandpoetssoundarchive/poetrysounds.msnw?action=get_message&mview=1&ID_Message=262
Regards.
Jim Clark
All rights are reserved on this sound recording/copyright/patent Jim Clark 2003
Musee des beax arts (The fall of Icarus)
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 Breughel'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.
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