Auden

I think most serious readers appreciate poetry only in vague and distant ways, the way musicians appreciate talent even in genres they despise. Most readers skim a poem, smile blandly, and move on.

That's okay. I can't make you like it. But if you're going to check this site (and most of you are sitting in offices, waiting for 5:00, checking this site just to pass the time), then you're going to be subjected to poems that I love. I won't pick this poem apart, but there's so much in it, so much I could say. If you are so inclined, I would love to hear what stands out to you when you read it.

Musee Des Beaux Arts
WH Auden, 1940

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 have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

(taken from Literature and the Writing Process, copyright 1996)