Originally Posted by
L.F.F.
This afternoon in the office there was a bit of commotion, a rumbling sort of sound as if a heavy trolley was being pushed down the ailse. It turned out someone had had a fit and an ambulance was on its way.
A while later, I was coming back from the toilet and I looked over at where it'd happened. I couldn't see the man, he was laying at the end of a bank of desks, but I could see the paramedic lady leaning over him.
It brought to mind the poem below. Strange that he was lying there while all around him people got on with the mundane things we do here.
Musée 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 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
W.H. Auden
ps, maybe google the painting, The Fall of Icarus by Breughel. It helped me to understand and enjoy the poem.
)
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