Inter/National Poetry Month + Poem: W. H. Auden

W. H. Auden

Every month should be Poetry Month--and Fiction Month and Literature Month--we could go down the list, but since 1996, roughly a year after the Academy of American Poets, inspired by Black History Month (every month should be...) and Women's History Month (every month should be...), convened with poets, academics, booksellers, and poetry lovers to create a month dedicated specifically to poetry. During the first decade or so of this blog, I usually posted close to a poem a day each April, often inspired by one theme or another (poets in translation, etc.).

When I went to Cuba in April 2009, when it was almost impossible to post daily, I somehow managed to. (How did I manage to?) I've slacked off in recent years because the rest of my responsibilities have crowded in on my time, but throughout this month I hope to post some poetry, at least periodically. Though it may make "nothing happen," as W. H. Auden famously said, he also continued, if you stay with that same poem, "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," it eludes the grasp of executives (unless of course it's set to music) and "survives / a way of happening, a mouth." That is, it gives voice to experiences, to visions, to feelings, in its particular form of representation, sometimes otherwise incommunicable, that we need and must listen to.

I guess since I have cited and quoted Auden's great poem, I should direct J's Theater readers to my post from 2012, which features it, and here, instead, is another Auden gem, "Musée de Beaux Arts," which I had to read in junior high and did not fully understand, though I get it now. As with so many of Auden's poems, the politics seem fitting for today; art offers a picture and mirror of the human sorrows we endure, and yet, at the same time, like the mundanities of life, it exists amidst the most unspeakable horrors, includes those enacted by the "torturer" whom Auden directly names. Sometimes, as in Pieter Breughel the Elder's "The Fall of Icarus," which Auden saw in 1938 at the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, nearly a year before the start of the then-brewing Second World War, at the and which he discusses ekphrastically in the poem's second stanza, the two happen at the same time; there is the horror of the boy falling from the sky, even as the rest of life--and death--go about their business.

Perhaps that should be the month's theme: ekphrastic poems. (Have I already done that? Hmmm.) Happy Inter/National Poetry Month!

MUSÉE DES BEAUX ARTS

by W. H. Auden

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.

Copyright © W. H. Auden, from Another Time (New York: Random House, 1940). All rights reserved.

And, the painting once attributed to Pieter Breughel the Elder, "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus," oil on canvas, c. 1560s, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium.