That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waitingįor the miraculous birth, there always must beĬhildren who did not specially want it to happen, skating While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along The Old Masters: how well they understood What should be a story of the spectacular failure of human ambition is represented by Bruegel in a dim corner of the canvas, dwarfed by the scale of a massive landscape, and overlooked by nearly all of the human characters in the painting.Ĭompare the painting to Auden's poem of 1938: Make sure you spot the following element of the painting. And there is a brief bio of Pieter Bruegel the Elder here it places Bruegel in the context of 16th century Flemish narrative painting, marks his Italian training, and indicates the influence of Hieronymus Bosch. You can see a large format version of Bruegel's 1558 painting here. One also encounters Alexander Nemerov's helpful essay in the current issue of Critical Inquiry, which relates the poem to Auden's experiences of the war in China in 1938, and situates the painting in the actual Musée des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. Looking up the poem on the internet, one comes across, first of all, the painting by Bruegel called Landscape and The Fall of Icarus, which inspired Auden. Auden's poem "Musée des Beaux Arts" with a student during office hours recently, specifically the question of how to spot irony (the student had missed it). Rising from the pool to tend the fallen figure were three mermaids, long hair looped and coiled about angelic faces: one held a small harp, one wore a coronet of woven ivy leaves, and one reached beneath Icarus’s torso, white hands on creamy skin, to pull him from the deep.I was discussing W.H. His wings, pale marble etched to give the impression of feathers, were strapped to his outspread arms and fell behind, weeping over the rock. Midway up, creamy marble against the brown, the life-size figure of Icarus had been carved in a position of recline. From the center emerged a huge craggy block of russet marble, the height of two men, thick at the base but tapering to a peak. It was lined with tiny glass tiles, azure blue like the necklace of sapphires Lord Ashbury had brought back for Lady Violet after serving in the Far East. The circular pool of stacked stone stood two feet high and twenty feet across at its widest point. “Though Eros and Psyche sat vast and magnificent in the front lawn, a prologue to the grand house itself, there was something wonderful- a mysterious and melancholic aspect- about the smaller fountain, hidden within its sunny clearing at the bottom of the south garden. Or vainly assuming that already I knew all īoth of them a single, blue speck of an idea?” Too earger to know where lay my allegiance On account of the fleeting, white-hot intoxicationĪnd did the heavens abet the plan to punish me? Was it devised by the earth, to which I belonged, More natural by far than that improbable passion? That to fall, not to fly, is in the order of things, Show such swiftness to encompass my fall? Nor have I longed for the ease of Nature,ĭriven by naught save this strange yearningįor the higher, and the closer, to plunge myselfĭazzled, perhaps, by the dizzy incandescence I am drawn higher and higher, more unstable,Ĭloser and closer to the sun's effulgence.Īlthough the goal could never have been love, Why, still, should the lust for ascension Till no aberrant element should, by rights, remain. Why, when balance has been strictly studiedĪnd flight calculated with the best of reason Fix me thus with their ceaseless blue stare,
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