"Musée des Beaux Arts," by W.H. Auden
Author: W. H. Auden
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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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I’m the Tech Liaison for the New York City Writing Project. I… (more)
I’m the Tech Liaison for the New York City Writing Project. I… (more)
I understand most of the text since it falls within my 9th grade lexile level of 1050L-1185L. The words I am unfamiliar with are “martyrdom,” “Breughel’s Icarus,” and “forsaken.” From what I can gather from the context of the text, it seems that the poem is about how human suffering is an unavoidable part of life even though it can often go unnoticed. The poem uses the examples of children playing and a ploughman and the sun continuing their activities despite one of the characters, Icarus, in Breughel’s painting having a major misfortune. Could you please explain these words and help me better understand the poem?
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