Two poems stole my attention away from the war in Ukraine this week, only to rivet it back directly on the wider meaning of that war. The first was a poem by W.H. Auden called, Musée des Beaux Arts, which was paired with a painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder titled, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. The pairing was published as an interactive essay by Elisa Gabbert called, “A Poem (and a Painting) About Suffering that Hides in Plain Sight,” in The New York Times. Her essay, as well as the poem and the painting, are nothing short of brilliant.
First, the painting.
Now Auden’s poem.
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.
Poetry Foundation - Auden describes Auden as “a poet of analytical clarity who sought for order, for universal patterns of human existence.” As Putin’s war grinds on, I think many of us share Auden’s search for clarity and order, for some way to get a grip on what is happening around and to us. His poem opens a window on our indifference to the suffering of others. This is something I have been grappling with as we watch Ukrainians bravely fight to defend their homes and their identity. We in the Free World are pouring massive amounts of humanitarian relief and defensive weapons into Ukraine, our proxy in the cage match of Democracy vs. Autocracy. There is something obscenely gladiatorial about this conflict, where we sit in the collective Coliseum, cheering on the fight to the death from the relative safety of our front row seats.
We Lived Happily During the War
By Ilya Kaminsky
And when they bombed other people’s houses, we
protested
but not enough, we opposed them but not
enough. I was
in my bed, around my bed America
was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house.
I took a chair outside and watched the sun.
In the sixth month
of a disastrous reign in the house of money
in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money,
our great country of money, we (forgive us)
lived happily during the war.
These poems invite us to seek analytical clarity on the morality of this war, how we feel about it, and what we think about it. Most importantly, they caution us not to live either obliviously or happily within it.
Keep it real!
Marilyn
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