Creative Writing 300

Monday, March 7, 2011

1 comment:

Lis HorowitzMarch 8, 2011 at 10:02 AM
Check out this blogspot site "How a Poem Happens" and see you at CC Mezzanine for our poetry reading on Thursday!!http://howapoemhappens.blogspot.com/2010/10/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-x-none_26.html
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The Language of Poetry

Musee des Beaux Arts

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.

Creative Writing 300

Pieter Bruegel, the Elder

Monday, March 7, 2011

1 comment:

Williams Responds to Auden and to Breugel

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