The libretto from Madame Butterfly echoed the sentiments of Auden’s Old Masters from the poem I had just read a few hours earlier. Butterfly is in her own way Bruegel’s Icarus character, whose suffering is a simple fact of the world, only briefly acknowledged. The similarities continue. Just as it was a ship which “must have seen / Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, / [but] Had somewhere to go to and sailed calmly on,” Butterfly’s heart was broken by an admiral who has returned to Japan only to pick up their son and then sail calmly on to America with his new American wife.

The isolation, the solitude of suffering that I witnessed in Madame Butterfly, was the same of which “Musée des Beaux Arts” spoke. As I read the words of the poem in my dorm room, again and again, I was struck by how well Auden understood 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.” I relished these lines; the isolation in grieving the loss of my father was something I felt deeply on a daily basis. At the meal hall or in classes, I found myself astounded that others could carry on with life, even while smiling. Auden’s poem became a way to read my own experience and to put it into words, words that made the reality of the situation more bearable, if only because of their beauty. My friends and roommates became the “Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating / On a pond at the edge of the wood.” In the rare moments when I would mention the loss of meaning that I felt, they would try to understand for a moment, giving me hope that someone might understand. Then they would move on to something else. My friends “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.”

Selected Poems by W.H. Auden

I felt that just as in the poem, “everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster...the forsaken cry,” my friends and the world that I knew turned away a few days after the funeral. So I turned to poetry. I began to read the poem so much that I memorized its number in the Selected Poems (42) and its page number (79). Then I read Auden’s “Ms. Gee,” which though it lacks the subtle beauty that “Musée” has, also reiterates the truth that the cold facts of the world—the law and the economy—cannot assuage or sympathize with suffering. One of Auden’s most brilliant poems, “The Shield of Achilles,” told me of a world that I was not alone in not knowing a “world where promises were kept / Or one could weep because another wept.” I was so thankful for Auden, who said what no one else could, who was a friend and advisor when I needed one. His poetry was a gift to me of language, sympathy, beauty, and truth.

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“Musée des Beaux Arts” is about suffering. Auden’s commentator, John Fuller, makes that clear when he notes that Auden “deliberately inverted the word order of the opening statement so as to begin with this important word,” the word “about”. For a few years, though, I did not see anything else in the poem besides suffering. The other images in the poem—the children and those who are reverently waiting—existed, but they existed only to lend the suffering weight, which is achieved “from the juxtaposition of momentous suffering with the unconcerned lives of ordinary people”.

Image copyright Life Magazine

Auden wrote in an essay on Kierkegaard that “the Christian who suffers is tempted to think this a proof that he is nearer to God than those who suffer less.” I think that Auden himself was someone who was in danger of falling into that temptation. As Auden says: “we find Good Friday easy to accept: what scandalizes us is Easter: Modern man finds a happy ending, a final victory of Love over the Prince of this World, very hard to swallow.” This is a temptation that I am guilty of indulging. When I was finally able to return to the faith that I abandoned after my father died, I assumed that my suffering—the grief and subsequent clinical depression—made me closer to God than those around me. Thus, in my reading of the poem, all I saw was Icarus falling into the sea while the world continued as though nothing had happened. But Auden also knew that there is more to life than suffering, as his comments on King Lear show:

“This is a profoundly unsuperstitious play. I do not agree that it is a nihilistic or pessimistic one. Certain states of being—reconciliation, forgiveness, devotion—are states of blessedness, and they exist while other people—conventionally successful people—are in states of misery and chaos”.

In the poem, as in life, I saw ignorance instead of blessedness. Instead of devotion, I saw neglect.

It is only in writing this essay, in going back and rereading the poem that I thought I knew so well, that I am able to see the other aspects of the poem. Unbeknownst to me, Auden references two other Bruegel paintings besides Landscape with the Fall of Icarus: The Numbering at Bethlehem and Winter Landscape with Skaters and Bird Trap. Of course, I knew that “Musée des Beaux Arts” made reference to “the miraculous birth,” and “children skating on a pond at the edge of a wood,” but they were incidentals. Every time I read the poem, I would dwell on the second stanza: Icarus drowning. Now, four years after the death of my father I can stop and appreciate the nativity scene and the kids skating. Suffering exists in life, and life goes on, but it is within that space—between suffering and life—that grace exists.

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After Auden I discovered others: Yeats, Eliot, Donne, Herbert, Milosz, and Stevens. I ended up studying English and philosophy; the sciences could not speak to my questions about humanity, about life. After college, I taught English for a year, trying to convey my love of literature and poetry to students. Once, in my first month of teaching, I read “Musée des Beaux Arts” to my sophomore English class. It was a hot autumn afternoon, the last class on a Friday. I read slowly so as to let the weight of the words sink in. As I looked up at the end of the poem, I think I expected to see bright faces illuminated by the beauty and truth contained within Auden’s lines. Heads rested heavily on desks. A few students looked outside at the trees, then beginning to change to reds and yellows. Only one student looked at me pensively, as if it ask, “How do you want us to react?”

I wanted to tell those fifteen-year-olds that “Musée des Beaux Arts” is inextricably linked in my life with death and grief; that the poem spoke to me when nothing else did. I wanted to tell them what the great 20^th century Polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz said in an interview that “every [piece of] poetry is directed against death—against death of the individual, against the power of death.” In fighting against death, poetry embraces life. The poet and the poem exist not only to give us comfort in the time of need, but also to confront us with hard truths, truths that are probably best confronted with silence, but if spoken are best done so through poetry. But my students’ minds were swimming with thoughts of plans for the weekend. I chose silence, and dismissed them to enjoy the changing leaves.