The Story Archive

Musée des Beaux Arts

W. H. Auden · 1938 CE · Poem · English · Modernist

About suffering the Old Masters were never wrong: it happens while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along, and the aged wait for the miraculous birth while children skate on a pond at the edge of the wood. The second half turns to a ploughman who may have heard the splash and the forsaken cry but had somewhere to get to, and to a ship that sails calmly on. Built on a Bruegel panel of the fall of Icarus.

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