Musée des Beaux Arts
W.H. Auden Written: 1938 • Published: 1939
This is an excerpt presented under fair use for educational purposes. Read the full text here.
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.
[Excerpt - full poem available at external link]
Curator's Note
Inspired by Pieter Bruegel's painting 'Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,' Auden captures a profound truth: that while tragedy unfolds for one person, the world simply continues. Written on the eve of World War II, the poem's observation that suffering 'takes place while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along' has become one of poetry's most quoted insights into human indifference. The Old Masters understood this paradox—that the miraculous birth and the tortured death happen alongside mundane life.
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