November’s poem

I haven’t been contagious since Wednesday or Thursday, but Samuel needs me to stay indoors with him (he’s not allowed to go out until Monday). Today, with Karin at home, I left the house for the first time since I learned I had COVID. I ran the usual number of miles, with dismaying slowness. My plan for this afternoon is to visit the library.

I am dealing with my “cabin fever” just in time to endure another bout of it. Yesterday, we had our first snow of the year. More is expected.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

W.H. Auden, “Musée des Beaux Arts” (1938):

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

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.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

I wonder if Breugel (he had dropped the “h” from his name) painted the landscape first, and then thought, This sea looks kinda Greek; I’d better put something Greek in it. How about Icarus.

Probably not.