A Lesser Splash

On Wednesday evening we had our Poetry Evening. We hadn't advertised the 'do' very well, but we reached seventeen folk by the end of the evening. It was great fun. We had some original poetry and some old favourites.

For my turn, I read from W. H. Auden, a poem called 'Musee des Beaux Arts'. It is about a painting by Pieter Bruegel called 'Landscape with the Fall of Icarus'. The painting is a sly take on the ancient myth about Icarus and his father Daedalus who try to escape from captivity by making two pairs of false wings. These are feathers sealed together with wax. At first they fly off with no trouble, but the exhilirated Icarus flies higher and higher, but too close to the sun, which melts the wax and disintegrates his wings. The poor lad then crashes to earth.  This is it:



In some ways there is a comic element to this. All you can see of Icarus is his two legs splashing about in an ungainly fashion as he sinks beneath the water. This is down towards the bottom right hand corner of the painting. And the point is that no-one is looking. No-one notices. Even the closest figure to him, the fisherman, is concentrating on his line rather than the tragedy taking place before him.

Auden's poem is a bit more po-faced than the painting. He turns the image into a meditation on suffering:

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

But there are some lovely touches:

some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree

We don't know what sort of life dogs have so Auden simply refers to 'their doggy life'. The dog in the picture is looking up in the same direction as his dreamy master, the shepherd, but he is in his own thoughts or what passes for thoughts. The horse in the picture has a large behind, and you can just imagine him backing up to a tree and having a good scratch.

The reason that this poem speaks to me as a Christian is that it is true - most suffering in this world goes on out of sight. We don't notice it. It's over there somewhere. We can't do anything about it, or so we think. But we have no excuse to be ignorant. When Jesus talked about the Rich Man and Lazarus, it was the Rich man's ignorance of the poor Lazarus at his gate that most annoyed him.

Our intercessions during our Sunday and weeday services are and expression of our concern for the world, but also an education into where so much suffering takes place. Suffering cannot ever be ignored, it must be addressed, prayed about, prepared for and tackled wherever it is possible. The tackling is the most difficult issue, but we have no hope unless we address, pray and prepare beforehand.