Musée des Beaux Arts

舞者

Musée des Beaux Arts
by W. H. Auden

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 Brueghel'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.

W. H. Auden, "Musee des Beaux Arts," from Collected Poems by W. H. Auden, edited by Edward Mendelson. Copyright © 1976 by Edward Mendelson, William Meredith and Monroe K. Spears, Executors of the Estate of W. H. Auden.Used by permission of Random House, Inc.

mu

So busy these days! Keep working on Eclogues, trying to recite it. What about you?

舞者

made a mistake posting auden's poems, they should have followed the introduction--and it will be easier to find.  

moved this under the introduction, and would have deleted this poem (but not sure about your reply).

Leaving Ecologues alone for a little--will go back soon.  Am reading on rhyme, meter, style for both English and Chinese poetry, and on translation, got tons of books from Dangdang etc.--of course, children's books and Auden.

Why is there huge space at the end of each post? Thanks.

mu

The space is perhaps caused by the template.
rhyme, meter, style ..I prefer to translate into a blank verse...