Poetry in America with Elisa New (2018–…): Season 1, Episode 7 - Musée des Beaux Arts - full transcript
"Musee des Beaux Arts" by W.H. Auden, featuring Samantha Power, Peter Sacks, David Brooks
"About suffering,
they were never wrong,
the old Masters."
"How well they
understood its human position."
"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."
It's December 1938.
The young poet W.H. Auden
ponders Europe's descent
once again into chaos.
It is only 20 years
since the end of World War I.
But through the '30s,
Auden has witnessed
the atrocities
of the war in Spain,
civilians massacred in China,
Hitler's troops on the march,
and Jews, desperate
for passports,
looking to get out of Europe.
With suffering on his mind,
Auden spends a day in the Musée
des Beaux Arts in Brussels.
In one room, three paintings
by the Dutch Master Brueghel
draw his attention.
Each sets an ancient religious
or mythological scene...
A scene of suffering in the most
ordinary of Dutch squares.
In "The Census of Bethlehem,"
Mary and Joseph trudge unnoticed
as children skate
and townspeople
go about their business.
In "The Massacre
of the Innocents,"
armed soldiers aim their pikes
while others watch on
from their doorways.
And in "Landscape
with the Fall of Icarus,"
a boy plunges into the ocean
while a fisherman
plays out his line
and a ship sails by,
and a ploughman ploughs.
Suffering happens
while others look away.
One truth it contains
is that suffering
is an isolating experience...
That when you're suffering,
others are not actually
feeling what you're feeling,
and that, therefore, you are,
in some way, cut off from them.
They're going about their lives.
And even if they're looking at
you and sympathizing with you,
they're not quite
there with you.
I think about the poem
particularly with Syria
with issue of displacement
and how many mothers, you know,
on the road are
taking to a boat, a dinghy,
with some creepy smuggler
who does not have
their best interest at heart,
and knowing how vulnerable
their children are,
whether to bombing
or to drowning, or, you know,
whatever the horrific
circumstance is.
Suffering was very much
in Auden's marrow,
as particularly
the 1930s went on,
and he began to see
what human power can do.
January 1939...
Auden leaves Europe for good.
His first volume
published in the United States
includes one of the greatest
poems of the 20th century...
"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 Brueghel'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've seen
something amazing."
"A boy falling
out of the sky"...
"Had somewhere to get to"...
"And sailed calmly on."
I'm struck by this
first line... "About suffering,
they were never wrong,"
comma, next line,
"the old Masters."
What would have
been the difference, I wonder,
if he had written,
"The old Masters
were never wrong
about suffering"?
By putting "about suffering"
first, the central character
is suffering,
and not the old Masters.
It's not like, "This is a
poem... I'm about to teach you
about suffering."
It's not... "I'm not going to
give you a poem
about who the Masters
are and how smart they were."
To begin the poem
with the word "about"
means that this poem is...
it's a kind of opinion poem,
it's an attitude poem.
And "about suffering"... this
isn't a poem of suffering,
or in suffering;
it's about one's position
in relation to suffering.
He uses that word, position,
which is a very cold,
abstract word.
"How well they understood
its human position."
There's a kind of
casualness about that.
"About suffering, they were
never wrong, the old Masters."
There's a fairly...
a very civilized tone.
How does that line sit with you?
Well, I love the way he did it.
- Why? Why do you love it?
- Because it doesn't
fundamentally matter.
"The old Masters," I think,
you know,
refers to the artists,
and so forth,
whose paintings moved him,
and...
And the "old Masters"
could be philosophers,
it could be spiritual guides.
But also,
they're the power brokers.
And he had his own suspicions
about their highfalutin position
as visionaries.
The old Masters,
they're both part
of the description,
but also part of the problem.
There's a sort of blurring of...
you know, they were never wrong,
because they described it
accurately,
versus a righteous
never-wrongness, you know.
To say they were never wrong
suggests that you know
what wrongness might be,
and that you're
somehow superior.
You can tell, "Oh, they were
never wrong about this."
One hears somebody's attitude,
somebody's tone.
Yes.
...that might
need to be adjusted
in the course of the poem,
and we hear that
in "about suffering."
Yes.
My feeling is that Auden is,
I think, differentiating himself
from the old Masters,
and my sense is that he wanted
to be a 20th century poet.
And one of the things that had
happened in the 20th century,
to his mind,
was that suffering was
becoming increasingly ordinary.
It was happening all around.
So they could afford
never to be wrong.
But can we?
"How it takes place..."
"While someone else
is eating, or opening...
"...a window,
or just walking dully along."
We are asking governments
to make a deeper commitment
to funding U.N. and humanitarian
organizations and appeals,
and to welcome more refugees
into their countries.
The truth is, certainly,
that I feel
my days reflected in this poem.
On the one hand,
living with the knowledge,
deep knowledge, of what is
going on in a place like Aleppo,
that is being shellacked,
bombarded from the air,
knowing that hospitals
are being hit,
that families
are being shattered.
And then having my own kids,
you know, coming back
with their prosaic concerns
from school relative to those
of the kids in Aleppo,
certainly.
The sunshine of New York City,
the luxury of being
the American ambassador
to the U.N.,
we, meaning humanity,
you know, tend to sigh
and lament, and nobody
wishes it to be such,
you know,
who's far away from it,
and who knows of the suffering.
But it's just
someone else's problem.
And the grind and distractions,
but also the daily joys
are our own, and not so clouded
by the boy falling
from the sky, as it were.
One person's suffering,
the other person is just
walking dully along.
Yeah, walking and opening...
and the... those present,
progressive verbs, you know,
tell us life goes on.
There's ploughing,
there's disappearing into,
there's skating.
And skating is wonderfully
rhymed against...
Against waiting. - Yes.
And so they're reverently,
passionately waiting.
These others are
mastering the surface,
the frozen surface of life in
which they can just skate along.
Which will actually then
play off against
this disappearing into,
the sinking of the boy
through the water.
In a way, if the poem is devoted
to the ongoingness of life,
I think he's interested in the
innocence that also coexists
with darker elements
of murderousness.
The truth is so much
coexists at any given moment.
I mean even in Aleppo,
while someone's...
some mother's son is ending up
in the ambulance
with his dust-strewn face,
some five-year-old boy,
even there,
someone is opening a window.
You know, and it just
is the case
that people are going along
with their business,
going along with their lives.
And so that juxtaposition
is existing,
even in the inferno itself.
We haven't talked
a whole lot about words
like "specially," "doggy,"
"leisurely," "dully."
"Anyhow."
It's such plain language,
in addition to being
such pedestrian activities.
Well, I think the juxtaposition
of suffering, martyrdom,
boy falling out of the sky,
with the chipper, upbeat,
folksy language
is very deliberate
and very... very powerful.
I notice "specially."
That's right.
There were always...
yes, "must be children
who did not specially
want it to happen."
This happens to be the birth
of Christ, the Christ child!
As though this event
were not even important enough
for a more elevated language.
Yes. - Right?
And that adverb, "dully,"
which is so offset against
what you might imagine
to be the high grip
of suffering,
it's one of several adverbs
that he's seeding
throughout the poem
in ways that deflate.
What do you think?
- Well, I don't where the...
what the "anyhow" means.
"That even the dreadful
martyrdom must run its course,"
is that period?
And then, "Anyhow in a corner,
the dogs are doing
their doggy stuff"?
No, it's... I don't think
it's a period.
Yeah, there's no period there.
It's not a period.
So I want to put a period there,
"That the dreadful martyrdom
does not run its course,
anyhow."
And that the "anyhow" doesn't
refer back to the "martyrdom"
as if it's a certain casual
dismissal of the martyrdom.
To juxtapose
"dreadful martyrdom"
in the middle of a line
with the simple four words,
"must run its course,"
Oh, how dreadful, dreadful.
- Little... maybe
back to the tone of...
maybe back to that...
Exactly, it's the tone...
You can decide how dreadful
you're going to make...
- Oh, how dreadful, right.
- Yeah, and then
"some untidy spot."
Interesting adjective, untidy.
Can't we clean this up?
Can't we make this more
like a miraculous birth?
Mm-hmm, and Auden just
so brilliantly knows how
to introduce that and make it
uncomfortable for the reader.
"Where the dogs go on
with their doggy life."
"And the torturer's horse
scratches its innocent behind."
"And the torturer's
horse scratches
its innocent behind on a tree."
I think there is
something almost ludicrous
going on.
There's a kind of ruthless way
in which Auden knows,
and it may be discomforting,
but he's really going to put it
there and make it work.
And he's appealing
to our cruelty,
our childish cruelty.
Yes, but there's also
a kind of anger,
and a kind of remorse about
having to say that.
So he's so complicated morally.
We've all seen executions on TV,
or if we haven't seen them
in life, in wartime.
And if you look at them,
they're pretty tawdry.
They're just, like, a couple
guys kneeling by a ditch
on the side of the road,
and somebody shoots them
in the back of the head.
And I saw one on TV recently,
and the guy's shirt billowed
with the force of the bullet,
just like a wind
passed over his shirt.
And it's not heroic at all...
It's just a little ditch.
How are we to find
some moral perspective
on this ditch?
Looking at its squalor
with fascination is indecent.
Decent men and women do look
away in ordinary times.
Life goes on.
But what about those times
when we cannot look away,
when suffering is
pervasive and inevitable,
when the ditch is what is true?
Can the painter help us
gain perspective then?
Can the poet?
His thinking about these matters
was intense at this time.
He had read Mein Kampf,
he had been aware of what was
going on in Europe in 1938.
Belgium...
Of course, Brussels had been
a city of tremendous suffering
in the First World War.
Auden had seen aerial warfare,
boys falling out of the sky.
He said the poet should not be
propagandist, reformer.
He says, if you want to, okay,
but it's not the task
of the poet.
The task of the poet is
to maintain the accuracy
of language.
And that's where he links it
to politics,
because he says as soon as
language becomes inaccurate,
we have violence.
This is a poem that maintains
a casual sound.
It doesn't, in an initial
reading, seem formally crafted.
One doesn't... one might not
even notice the rhymes.
And yet, there they are...
Wrong-along, waiting-skating.
All the way through.
Forgot-spot, tree-be.
It's a kind of craft
which is going to be
persisting throughout the poem,
saying that, "I can put this
into an arrangement."
Yes, there's a...
"I'm a shaper."
Yes, and that's
the auditory equivalent
of the visual composition.
I should say why I like Auden
more than most poets...
Because he...
A, he has narrative.
There's story, and some of us
only think really narratively.
And B, he has argument.
This actually reads
like an argument, right?
Like, first we're
talking about suffering,
I'm invoking suffering,
so you know exactly what I mean,
and then, "in Brueghel's Icarus,
for instance."
"In Brueghel'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...
"...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."
So what do we see
in this painting?
These are the images that strike
me the most, you know...
The looking away at whatever
is on his mind,
him just going about
his business.
The ploughman.
Yeah, the ploughman,
the infamous ploughman.
The ploughman,
such a central figure.
"May"... interesting word.
He may have heard the splash,
he may have heard
the forsaken cry.
"The ploughman
may have heard the splash,
the forsaken cry."
"Forsaken cry"
turns the emotional...
Turns it up, yes.
"Forsaken cry."
Yes, yes.
It's actually the most
operatic word, "forsaken."
It's an interesting word,
forsaken.
Because we've had martyrdom,
we've had the nativity,
and Christ. - Christ.
He says, "Why hast thou
forsaken me?"
Auden notes the ploughman,
who may have heard the splash,
may have heard the forsaken cry,
but for him it was not
an important failure.
Now, what should he have done?
Should he have dropped
the plough, run to get help?
What's...
- He's actually pretty...
- He's so engaged
in the ploughing.
He's pretty close, though.
So he's close, and yet,
there's another level
of activity between
him and the ship, and just...
Brueghel's eye
is so fabulously intrigued,
and I think this is part of
Auden's interest as well,
is just the technique
of the artist
and what distance
that creates from a scene
of suffering
in the pleats of the soil
as it's being ploughed
in relation to the pleats
of the tunic that
the ploughman's wearing,
that vivid red that's right
in the center of the painting,
as if that's what's important
is the arm of the ploughman,
not the legs of the boy.
As a painter, there's an almost
democratic distribution
of attention
to all the details...
The chains on the link that
binds the plough to the horse.
The colors,
the chromaticism of the sky
as it reflects itself
on the surface of the water.
"The sun shone,
as it had to, on the white legs
disappearing into
the green water."
"The white legs
disappearing into
the green water."
It has an emotional,
or a vivid punch, actually,
in terms of the suffering,
again, with great economy.
I mean, who cares what color
the legs in the water were
if this poor person
is falling out of the sky
and drowning?
But the painter cares.
- Yeah, the painter cares.
- And the poet cares to mention
what the painter cared about.
"And the expensive,
delicate ship
"that must have seen
something amazing,
a boy falling out of the sky."
And then "the delicate ship."
The key word there
is "delicate."
Ships are not always delicate.
They can be delicate, I guess,
with the rigging.
And it's almost... there's sort
of an aristocratic element.
- Oh, it's an expensive,
delicate ship.
- Yeah, yeah.
There's something disparaging
about the expensive ship,
about its delicacy.
So it's both admiring,
and yet...
...is this the most important
human achievement?
I bring that up
because I think the ship
is going to stand in
for yet another craft,
and the craft of the poem
has got its eye on the craft
that is sailing on... it's
the final agent of the poem.
The ship that sails calmly on,
which is a very nice way
to put it.
And that's what people do... they
go calmly about their business.
The second it gets at the normal
indifference we all have,
and the paradox,
which is we're aware
of suffering,
we sympathize
with the suffering,
but we can't sympathize
with every act of suffering.
Because there's seven billion
people in the world...
That's a lot of suffering.
It would sort of
encumber our lives.
And so...
I've covered events like
the decline of the Soviet Union,
some riots,
some killings in Africa,
people dying of AIDS in Africa,
and you're in the hospitals
and they're all dying.
And you want this to stop.
Well, a lot of
what you're trying to do,
if you witness something
that you've seen directly,
you're trying to bring the
reality to make the people
far away feel what you felt
when you were right there.
And there are
all those people back home
going to the Mets game.
And you want them to feel this,
and you want them to act,
and you want to elicit outrage.
And so you write in a way that
will personalize it,
that will elicit their outrage,
and you're hoping it'll pay off.
And most of the time it doesn't,
but some of the time it does.
I give you the example
of Ebola and the U.N.
Basically, everybody's impulse
was "Let me keep my people
away from that problem,"
even though, cognitively,
they knew that the problem
was just going to spread
and would inevitably
come to their country
if we didn't deal with it.
But then, instead of
relying on U.N. bureaucrats
to brief the problem,
where we actually beamed
a Liberian health worker
who spoke to a room in which
you could've heard a pin drop
about what it was like
to turn away a father
who was carrying his daughter.
For a health worker to say that,
versus the W.H.O. saying,
"The statistical assessment
is the following..."
I mean, it was transformative.
There are scenes one could
depict of heroic acts,
like my Liberian health worker,
who, himself, is likely
to get Ebola by working
in this clinic.
And so you choose what you
depict and whose actions
you put in the foreground.
Yet there's a truth here
that we can live, blithe,
hugging our small reality
as large tragedies play
themselves out elsewhere.
And so I think the poem is
holding us morally accountable,
and it's showing us what
is largely the case.
It's a summons.
Is this poem holding us
morally responsible,
or is it just
revealing the facts?
I think its greatness
is that it's doing both.
It's admitting that
this is the way things are,
this is the way humans are.
They're capable
not only of overt cruelty
but of turning away.
He understands
that we're guilty,
and we have to somehow
live with that as well.
they were never wrong,
the old Masters."
"How well they
understood its human position."
"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."
It's December 1938.
The young poet W.H. Auden
ponders Europe's descent
once again into chaos.
It is only 20 years
since the end of World War I.
But through the '30s,
Auden has witnessed
the atrocities
of the war in Spain,
civilians massacred in China,
Hitler's troops on the march,
and Jews, desperate
for passports,
looking to get out of Europe.
With suffering on his mind,
Auden spends a day in the Musée
des Beaux Arts in Brussels.
In one room, three paintings
by the Dutch Master Brueghel
draw his attention.
Each sets an ancient religious
or mythological scene...
A scene of suffering in the most
ordinary of Dutch squares.
In "The Census of Bethlehem,"
Mary and Joseph trudge unnoticed
as children skate
and townspeople
go about their business.
In "The Massacre
of the Innocents,"
armed soldiers aim their pikes
while others watch on
from their doorways.
And in "Landscape
with the Fall of Icarus,"
a boy plunges into the ocean
while a fisherman
plays out his line
and a ship sails by,
and a ploughman ploughs.
Suffering happens
while others look away.
One truth it contains
is that suffering
is an isolating experience...
That when you're suffering,
others are not actually
feeling what you're feeling,
and that, therefore, you are,
in some way, cut off from them.
They're going about their lives.
And even if they're looking at
you and sympathizing with you,
they're not quite
there with you.
I think about the poem
particularly with Syria
with issue of displacement
and how many mothers, you know,
on the road are
taking to a boat, a dinghy,
with some creepy smuggler
who does not have
their best interest at heart,
and knowing how vulnerable
their children are,
whether to bombing
or to drowning, or, you know,
whatever the horrific
circumstance is.
Suffering was very much
in Auden's marrow,
as particularly
the 1930s went on,
and he began to see
what human power can do.
January 1939...
Auden leaves Europe for good.
His first volume
published in the United States
includes one of the greatest
poems of the 20th century...
"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 Brueghel'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've seen
something amazing."
"A boy falling
out of the sky"...
"Had somewhere to get to"...
"And sailed calmly on."
I'm struck by this
first line... "About suffering,
they were never wrong,"
comma, next line,
"the old Masters."
What would have
been the difference, I wonder,
if he had written,
"The old Masters
were never wrong
about suffering"?
By putting "about suffering"
first, the central character
is suffering,
and not the old Masters.
It's not like, "This is a
poem... I'm about to teach you
about suffering."
It's not... "I'm not going to
give you a poem
about who the Masters
are and how smart they were."
To begin the poem
with the word "about"
means that this poem is...
it's a kind of opinion poem,
it's an attitude poem.
And "about suffering"... this
isn't a poem of suffering,
or in suffering;
it's about one's position
in relation to suffering.
He uses that word, position,
which is a very cold,
abstract word.
"How well they understood
its human position."
There's a kind of
casualness about that.
"About suffering, they were
never wrong, the old Masters."
There's a fairly...
a very civilized tone.
How does that line sit with you?
Well, I love the way he did it.
- Why? Why do you love it?
- Because it doesn't
fundamentally matter.
"The old Masters," I think,
you know,
refers to the artists,
and so forth,
whose paintings moved him,
and...
And the "old Masters"
could be philosophers,
it could be spiritual guides.
But also,
they're the power brokers.
And he had his own suspicions
about their highfalutin position
as visionaries.
The old Masters,
they're both part
of the description,
but also part of the problem.
There's a sort of blurring of...
you know, they were never wrong,
because they described it
accurately,
versus a righteous
never-wrongness, you know.
To say they were never wrong
suggests that you know
what wrongness might be,
and that you're
somehow superior.
You can tell, "Oh, they were
never wrong about this."
One hears somebody's attitude,
somebody's tone.
Yes.
...that might
need to be adjusted
in the course of the poem,
and we hear that
in "about suffering."
Yes.
My feeling is that Auden is,
I think, differentiating himself
from the old Masters,
and my sense is that he wanted
to be a 20th century poet.
And one of the things that had
happened in the 20th century,
to his mind,
was that suffering was
becoming increasingly ordinary.
It was happening all around.
So they could afford
never to be wrong.
But can we?
"How it takes place..."
"While someone else
is eating, or opening...
"...a window,
or just walking dully along."
We are asking governments
to make a deeper commitment
to funding U.N. and humanitarian
organizations and appeals,
and to welcome more refugees
into their countries.
The truth is, certainly,
that I feel
my days reflected in this poem.
On the one hand,
living with the knowledge,
deep knowledge, of what is
going on in a place like Aleppo,
that is being shellacked,
bombarded from the air,
knowing that hospitals
are being hit,
that families
are being shattered.
And then having my own kids,
you know, coming back
with their prosaic concerns
from school relative to those
of the kids in Aleppo,
certainly.
The sunshine of New York City,
the luxury of being
the American ambassador
to the U.N.,
we, meaning humanity,
you know, tend to sigh
and lament, and nobody
wishes it to be such,
you know,
who's far away from it,
and who knows of the suffering.
But it's just
someone else's problem.
And the grind and distractions,
but also the daily joys
are our own, and not so clouded
by the boy falling
from the sky, as it were.
One person's suffering,
the other person is just
walking dully along.
Yeah, walking and opening...
and the... those present,
progressive verbs, you know,
tell us life goes on.
There's ploughing,
there's disappearing into,
there's skating.
And skating is wonderfully
rhymed against...
Against waiting. - Yes.
And so they're reverently,
passionately waiting.
These others are
mastering the surface,
the frozen surface of life in
which they can just skate along.
Which will actually then
play off against
this disappearing into,
the sinking of the boy
through the water.
In a way, if the poem is devoted
to the ongoingness of life,
I think he's interested in the
innocence that also coexists
with darker elements
of murderousness.
The truth is so much
coexists at any given moment.
I mean even in Aleppo,
while someone's...
some mother's son is ending up
in the ambulance
with his dust-strewn face,
some five-year-old boy,
even there,
someone is opening a window.
You know, and it just
is the case
that people are going along
with their business,
going along with their lives.
And so that juxtaposition
is existing,
even in the inferno itself.
We haven't talked
a whole lot about words
like "specially," "doggy,"
"leisurely," "dully."
"Anyhow."
It's such plain language,
in addition to being
such pedestrian activities.
Well, I think the juxtaposition
of suffering, martyrdom,
boy falling out of the sky,
with the chipper, upbeat,
folksy language
is very deliberate
and very... very powerful.
I notice "specially."
That's right.
There were always...
yes, "must be children
who did not specially
want it to happen."
This happens to be the birth
of Christ, the Christ child!
As though this event
were not even important enough
for a more elevated language.
Yes. - Right?
And that adverb, "dully,"
which is so offset against
what you might imagine
to be the high grip
of suffering,
it's one of several adverbs
that he's seeding
throughout the poem
in ways that deflate.
What do you think?
- Well, I don't where the...
what the "anyhow" means.
"That even the dreadful
martyrdom must run its course,"
is that period?
And then, "Anyhow in a corner,
the dogs are doing
their doggy stuff"?
No, it's... I don't think
it's a period.
Yeah, there's no period there.
It's not a period.
So I want to put a period there,
"That the dreadful martyrdom
does not run its course,
anyhow."
And that the "anyhow" doesn't
refer back to the "martyrdom"
as if it's a certain casual
dismissal of the martyrdom.
To juxtapose
"dreadful martyrdom"
in the middle of a line
with the simple four words,
"must run its course,"
Oh, how dreadful, dreadful.
- Little... maybe
back to the tone of...
maybe back to that...
Exactly, it's the tone...
You can decide how dreadful
you're going to make...
- Oh, how dreadful, right.
- Yeah, and then
"some untidy spot."
Interesting adjective, untidy.
Can't we clean this up?
Can't we make this more
like a miraculous birth?
Mm-hmm, and Auden just
so brilliantly knows how
to introduce that and make it
uncomfortable for the reader.
"Where the dogs go on
with their doggy life."
"And the torturer's horse
scratches its innocent behind."
"And the torturer's
horse scratches
its innocent behind on a tree."
I think there is
something almost ludicrous
going on.
There's a kind of ruthless way
in which Auden knows,
and it may be discomforting,
but he's really going to put it
there and make it work.
And he's appealing
to our cruelty,
our childish cruelty.
Yes, but there's also
a kind of anger,
and a kind of remorse about
having to say that.
So he's so complicated morally.
We've all seen executions on TV,
or if we haven't seen them
in life, in wartime.
And if you look at them,
they're pretty tawdry.
They're just, like, a couple
guys kneeling by a ditch
on the side of the road,
and somebody shoots them
in the back of the head.
And I saw one on TV recently,
and the guy's shirt billowed
with the force of the bullet,
just like a wind
passed over his shirt.
And it's not heroic at all...
It's just a little ditch.
How are we to find
some moral perspective
on this ditch?
Looking at its squalor
with fascination is indecent.
Decent men and women do look
away in ordinary times.
Life goes on.
But what about those times
when we cannot look away,
when suffering is
pervasive and inevitable,
when the ditch is what is true?
Can the painter help us
gain perspective then?
Can the poet?
His thinking about these matters
was intense at this time.
He had read Mein Kampf,
he had been aware of what was
going on in Europe in 1938.
Belgium...
Of course, Brussels had been
a city of tremendous suffering
in the First World War.
Auden had seen aerial warfare,
boys falling out of the sky.
He said the poet should not be
propagandist, reformer.
He says, if you want to, okay,
but it's not the task
of the poet.
The task of the poet is
to maintain the accuracy
of language.
And that's where he links it
to politics,
because he says as soon as
language becomes inaccurate,
we have violence.
This is a poem that maintains
a casual sound.
It doesn't, in an initial
reading, seem formally crafted.
One doesn't... one might not
even notice the rhymes.
And yet, there they are...
Wrong-along, waiting-skating.
All the way through.
Forgot-spot, tree-be.
It's a kind of craft
which is going to be
persisting throughout the poem,
saying that, "I can put this
into an arrangement."
Yes, there's a...
"I'm a shaper."
Yes, and that's
the auditory equivalent
of the visual composition.
I should say why I like Auden
more than most poets...
Because he...
A, he has narrative.
There's story, and some of us
only think really narratively.
And B, he has argument.
This actually reads
like an argument, right?
Like, first we're
talking about suffering,
I'm invoking suffering,
so you know exactly what I mean,
and then, "in Brueghel's Icarus,
for instance."
"In Brueghel'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...
"...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."
So what do we see
in this painting?
These are the images that strike
me the most, you know...
The looking away at whatever
is on his mind,
him just going about
his business.
The ploughman.
Yeah, the ploughman,
the infamous ploughman.
The ploughman,
such a central figure.
"May"... interesting word.
He may have heard the splash,
he may have heard
the forsaken cry.
"The ploughman
may have heard the splash,
the forsaken cry."
"Forsaken cry"
turns the emotional...
Turns it up, yes.
"Forsaken cry."
Yes, yes.
It's actually the most
operatic word, "forsaken."
It's an interesting word,
forsaken.
Because we've had martyrdom,
we've had the nativity,
and Christ. - Christ.
He says, "Why hast thou
forsaken me?"
Auden notes the ploughman,
who may have heard the splash,
may have heard the forsaken cry,
but for him it was not
an important failure.
Now, what should he have done?
Should he have dropped
the plough, run to get help?
What's...
- He's actually pretty...
- He's so engaged
in the ploughing.
He's pretty close, though.
So he's close, and yet,
there's another level
of activity between
him and the ship, and just...
Brueghel's eye
is so fabulously intrigued,
and I think this is part of
Auden's interest as well,
is just the technique
of the artist
and what distance
that creates from a scene
of suffering
in the pleats of the soil
as it's being ploughed
in relation to the pleats
of the tunic that
the ploughman's wearing,
that vivid red that's right
in the center of the painting,
as if that's what's important
is the arm of the ploughman,
not the legs of the boy.
As a painter, there's an almost
democratic distribution
of attention
to all the details...
The chains on the link that
binds the plough to the horse.
The colors,
the chromaticism of the sky
as it reflects itself
on the surface of the water.
"The sun shone,
as it had to, on the white legs
disappearing into
the green water."
"The white legs
disappearing into
the green water."
It has an emotional,
or a vivid punch, actually,
in terms of the suffering,
again, with great economy.
I mean, who cares what color
the legs in the water were
if this poor person
is falling out of the sky
and drowning?
But the painter cares.
- Yeah, the painter cares.
- And the poet cares to mention
what the painter cared about.
"And the expensive,
delicate ship
"that must have seen
something amazing,
a boy falling out of the sky."
And then "the delicate ship."
The key word there
is "delicate."
Ships are not always delicate.
They can be delicate, I guess,
with the rigging.
And it's almost... there's sort
of an aristocratic element.
- Oh, it's an expensive,
delicate ship.
- Yeah, yeah.
There's something disparaging
about the expensive ship,
about its delicacy.
So it's both admiring,
and yet...
...is this the most important
human achievement?
I bring that up
because I think the ship
is going to stand in
for yet another craft,
and the craft of the poem
has got its eye on the craft
that is sailing on... it's
the final agent of the poem.
The ship that sails calmly on,
which is a very nice way
to put it.
And that's what people do... they
go calmly about their business.
The second it gets at the normal
indifference we all have,
and the paradox,
which is we're aware
of suffering,
we sympathize
with the suffering,
but we can't sympathize
with every act of suffering.
Because there's seven billion
people in the world...
That's a lot of suffering.
It would sort of
encumber our lives.
And so...
I've covered events like
the decline of the Soviet Union,
some riots,
some killings in Africa,
people dying of AIDS in Africa,
and you're in the hospitals
and they're all dying.
And you want this to stop.
Well, a lot of
what you're trying to do,
if you witness something
that you've seen directly,
you're trying to bring the
reality to make the people
far away feel what you felt
when you were right there.
And there are
all those people back home
going to the Mets game.
And you want them to feel this,
and you want them to act,
and you want to elicit outrage.
And so you write in a way that
will personalize it,
that will elicit their outrage,
and you're hoping it'll pay off.
And most of the time it doesn't,
but some of the time it does.
I give you the example
of Ebola and the U.N.
Basically, everybody's impulse
was "Let me keep my people
away from that problem,"
even though, cognitively,
they knew that the problem
was just going to spread
and would inevitably
come to their country
if we didn't deal with it.
But then, instead of
relying on U.N. bureaucrats
to brief the problem,
where we actually beamed
a Liberian health worker
who spoke to a room in which
you could've heard a pin drop
about what it was like
to turn away a father
who was carrying his daughter.
For a health worker to say that,
versus the W.H.O. saying,
"The statistical assessment
is the following..."
I mean, it was transformative.
There are scenes one could
depict of heroic acts,
like my Liberian health worker,
who, himself, is likely
to get Ebola by working
in this clinic.
And so you choose what you
depict and whose actions
you put in the foreground.
Yet there's a truth here
that we can live, blithe,
hugging our small reality
as large tragedies play
themselves out elsewhere.
And so I think the poem is
holding us morally accountable,
and it's showing us what
is largely the case.
It's a summons.
Is this poem holding us
morally responsible,
or is it just
revealing the facts?
I think its greatness
is that it's doing both.
It's admitting that
this is the way things are,
this is the way humans are.
They're capable
not only of overt cruelty
but of turning away.
He understands
that we're guilty,
and we have to somehow
live with that as well.