Musée des Beaux Arts
by W. H. Auden 1907-73
(Collected Poems, Edited by Edward Mendelson, Faber & Faber)

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 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 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.

(December 1938)

A reckless youth falls, bizarrely, out of the sky to his death. Surely, we would notice that if we were there? Well, think again

While Saddam Hussein was being hanged, many of us were having breakfast. Had we been in the same room at the time the visible dichotomy of our separate pursuits — his in being hanged, and ours in eating — would have been unavoidable. Suffering — his, in this case — had to take place while the rest of us were doing something entirely unrelated, relevant only to our own lives, and which, if held up against his execution, would appear bizarre, poignant or insensitive in contrast to the gravity of the occasion. We generally live our lives without a great deal of awareness of those who are not involved with us in some way. And even in respect of those we are involved with, we do not know how they suffer when we are not looking, or what befalls them when we are not present.

Someone steps off a pavement into the road only to remember that they had forgotten to lock their front door. They step back on to the pavement to return home just as the truck that would have obliterated them passes safely by. They don’t notice their timely escape, having already turned away. A man falls from a roof farther down the street and is killed, but no one goes to his aid because no one saw him fall; everyone thinks he’s a drunk who’s passed out on the pavement. It is hard enough keeping track of what happens in our own lives, so, what chance of knowing what is happening to those with whom we have no connection?

In Auden’s poem the Old Masters understand the disparate positions of each individual and how suffering “takes place/ While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along”. They captured humanity in their paintings long before the advent of cameras: the aged are “passionately waiting/ For the miraculous birth” be it for Jesus Christ or a new family member. But “there always must be/ Children who did not specially want it to happen” because they are being pushed into adulthood by the advancement of age and the birth of younger siblings who replace the infants they once were.

Even “the dreadful martyrdom must run its course”, Auden tells us, “in a corner” . . . because martyrdom does not require a stage or an audience; it can happen anywhere. And the torturer’s horse is described as innocent because, by its very nature, it cannot be an accomplice in its master’s activities even if it delivers him to an occasion where someone else meets their demise; it is only a horse.

Auden recalls the painting of Icarus by Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1525-69), in which Icarus falls into the sea from the sky and drowns. In mythology, his father, Daedalus, designed and built the labyrinth for Minos, king of Crete, to house the Minotaur (carnivorous beast with the head of a bull on the body of a man), only to be imprisoned with his son so that the secrets of the labyrinth would never be revealed. He made feathered wings that were held together by wax, so that he and his son could escape by flying from the window of their prison. He warned Icarus not to fly too high or the wax would melt in the heat of the sun, but Icarus, bewitched by his new-found freedom and his ability to soar with the birds, forgot his father’s warning.

In the painting ( Landscape with the Fall of Icarus , Musées des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels), Icarus is not the central figure; he is tiny in the bottom right-hand corner, having just hit the water, not far from the indifferent ship. Auden tells us “how everything turns away . . . from the disaster”. The ploughman keeps ploughing (the shepherd who stands beyond him with his sheep is daydreaming, although he is not mentioned), and Icarus’s demise is just Icarus drowning, insignificantly, while life continues around him. We might think our lives are the most important lives in the world, but to everyone else it is quite the contrary.

Icarus’s downfall is the mythological equivalent of someone who propels their brand-new sports car into a wall, or a tree, or another human being, because they are arrogant about their abilities and want to show off their new toy. They imagine that they can control the vehicle despite insane speed and overtaking on blind corners in the belief that there is nothing coming, because today, of all days, they are “flying”. The fate of Icarus becomes a metaphor for all whose conceit persuades them to risk hubris, and forget their human limitations when showing off in an attempt to glorify themselves.

The sun catches Icarus’s white legs as they disappear into the green water, because it does not know any different; it is impartial to the event. Life goes on and we are reminded that something can happen right in front of us, or off to the left or the right, and if we are not attentive or interested we will not notice it. Later, we might insist that “it didn’t happen” because surely we would have seen it? But it did happen; we just weren’t looking.

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