I sit in one of the dives/ In Fifty-second Street, / Uncertain and afraid, / As the clever hopes expire / Of a low dishonest decade: / Waves of fear and anger / Circulate over the bright / And darkened lands of the earth
Thats the grim beginning of September 1, 1939 by the English poet, W. H. Auden. The 1930s had indeed been a low dishonest decade, ravaged by global economic depression, from whose wreckage had risen totalitarian leaders such as Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini. Now World War 2 was about to start.
As we navigate our own turbulent times, its good to keep some perspective: the waves of fear and anger will pass and a better world may yet emerge.
Talking of perspective, heres an Auden poem on that very theme, also from 1939: La Musée des Beaux Arts. In it Auden muses on how the old Masters (the great European painters) understood the human position of suffering: how they would juxtapose scenes of great religious or mythic significance with the stuff of everyday life carrying on as usual. As an example of this sense of perspective, Auden describes a painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (see above), depicting the fall of Icarus (the boy in Greek myth who, with wings made by his father, flew too close to the sun and came a cropper). In the painting, Icaruss fall is definitely not the main event (you have to look quite hard to see his little white legs disappearing into the green / Water); much more conspicuous are a ploughman and a ship, both of whom seem oblivious to poor Icarus fatal plunge.
I first read this poem in my English A level exam it was the unseen poem, and I had to think quickly of clever things to write about it (my poor Year 9s are doing a similar task even as I write this): a ghastly business. Even so, I immediately loved the poem: to my eighteen-year-old self, Auden sounded so relaxed, worldly and wise. The idea that life goes on is not exactly original or very deep but he made it sound reassuring, mildly humorous, even beautiful. Reading the poem now, many years later, I find myself less reassured by that worldly wise tone and more troubled by the poem and the painting. After all, its one thing for children or dogs or a horse to be unbothered by anothers suffering; but what excuse for the ploughman and the ships captain to turn away / Quite leisurely from the disaster? Is their business so important that they cannot stop to help or at least acknowledge anothers tragedy? That was a resonant question in 1939 and it resonates still.
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 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.
