(TV) something to ponder in light of columbia

[Jay <piazzasanmarco@yahoo.com>]

W. H. Auden        
                        
Musie 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
torturers horse 
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree. 
In Brueghels 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. 

http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~creswell/auden.html
  


=====
"I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart's affection and the truth of Imagination.  What Imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth--whether it existed before or not."
                                   --John Keats

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