Shoes, Ships, and Sealing Wax

my favorite poem

I got home late tonight...on the Metro I was thinking deep thoughts and composing a wordy entry. But by the time I got home, medicated Curly, and had dinner (i.e., now) I'm too tired to type.

I will cut & paste my very favorite poem. I like a lot of poetry, although I admit much is from the "greatest hit" collections that were our high school anthologies, but this is my favorite. I carry a copy of this poem. I think of it as instant perspective.

W.H. Auden

Musee 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 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.