Brueghel is in my life this week. His painting is on the cover and referenced in the book I am reading. I used a postcard of the first image above as a gift tag for a package sent to my dear friend because the colors matched the paper bow. And, we watched two movies over the holiday weekend, White Christmas and Museum Hours. A scene in Museum Hours, filmed in the Brueghel gallery of the Kunsthistorisches, sent me on a search for Auden's poem about Brueghel. I've copied it here because Brueghel has been a welcome guest.
MUSEE DES BEAUX ARTS
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 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.
