A Poem (and a Painting) About the Suffering That Hides in Plain Sight

A Poem (and a Painting) About the Suffering That Hides in Plain Sight

By Elisa Gabbert March 6, 2002

I’ve been reading this short, wry poem about suffering for more than 20 years.

How nice that it tells you in the first two words what it’s about.

No matter how familiar a poem is, rereading it always gives me a sense of first encounter, as though I’ve gone back to sleep and re-entered the dream through a different door.

MUSÉE DES BEAUX ARTS
by W.H. Auden

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.

This is an excerpt of the first three lines of A Poem (and a Painting) About the Suffering That Hides in Plain Sight by Elisa Gabbert, appearing in The New York Times on March 6, 2022.