An illustrated Sunday poem

[Landscape with The Fall of Icarus by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, 1525-1569]

My favourite teacher at school introduced this great piece of Auden to me when I was in my mid-teens (the Classics guy, naturally: he was an endearing oddball, and - since I didn't seem to need much help with the Latin and Greek - we'd spend hours hanging out and just chatting about stuff, any old stuff, stuff like this poem; his sensibility and interests, his mischievous sense of humour were rather reminiscent of my favourite blogger, Other Mens' Flowers Tony). I think it must have been shortly after this famous work of Brueghel's had been featured in Edwin Mullins's superb BBC2 series 100 Great Paintings - one of the highlights of my childhood and a cornerstone of my education. The painting is an elegant, bitter joke - the story of Icarus is so famous, such a powerful metaphor, but here it's reduced to an irrelevance, almost invisible - an observation on the triviality of human endeavours and the loneliness of suffering, brilliantly analysed by Auden.

Musée des Beaux Arts

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.

W.H. Auden (1907-1973)