W. H. Auden "Musee des Beaux Arts" Poem animation

Heres a virtual movie of WH Auden reading his much loved poem "Musee des Beaux Arts" W.H. Auden's best known poem 'Musee des Beaux Arts'Musée des Beaux Arts, based on Pieter Brueghel's painting, The Fall of Icarus, which hangs in the art gallery of that name in Brussels, was written in September 1938 and first published in New Writing, Spring 1939. The poem is about the reaction of people to the suffering of other persons and the relation of art to human response to suffering. The poem makes a reference to the mythological character Icarus who falls to the ocean after the wax wings made by his father Daedalus melt, and who subsequently drowns. 'Musee des Beaux Arts' and its portrayal of human apathy to suffering, the physical universe and redemptive death are evaluated. You can see the painting he is refering to here..

http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/bruegel/icarus.jpg

Kind Regards

Jim Clark
All rights are reserved on this video recording copyright Jim Clark 2011

Musee des Beaux Arts ......

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.

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