sailed calmly on

It's my birthday! I am still in Venice, which is great, except that I woke up this morning with a head cold and feel pretty crappy. We've been taking it easy today, shopping and packing and eating more good food, and tomorrow we fly back to New York. It's been an amazing trip, but I'm ready to go home.

This poem is not really a birthday poem, but it is Auden, and I love it, and I've never posted it before, which is sort of shocking (although I did post the William Carlos Williams companion poem back in 2010).

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.

—W. H. Auden (1907-1973), "Musée des Beaux Arts" from Another Time, 1940. Breughel's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.