Epitaph on a Tyrant

(Wystan Hugh Auden, photo by Cecil Beaton)

Yesterday, we finished our series of daily poems by the U.S poets laureate. These laureates are among the best of the country’s versifiers, speaking for us and speaking to us.

But there are several poets whose absence on this list is regrettable. Before we move on to the poets laureate of Great Britain, I’d like to pause to give two of them their due.

The first is W. H. Auden (1907-1973), an English-born American poet and essayist acclaimed as one of the great poets of the last century. He was an honest witness to the spirit of the age. "In so far as poetry, or any of the arts, can be said to have an ulterior purpose, it is, by telling the truth, to disenchant and disintoxicate," he once said.

Auden’s poems included the prophetic warnings he uttered after a visit to the Museum of Beaux Arts in Brussels in 1938, as dark clouds loomed above Europe. Referring to three paintings by Peter Bruegel the Elder he saw there on the walls, he wrote:

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;

Like one of his contemporaries, another great poet of memory and witness, Czeslaw Milosz, Auden also contemplated might be called the legacy of original sin on human nature, whether it be the example of the solitary tyrant at the peak of the pyramid or those who keep the common man at its base.

EPITAPH ON A TYRANT

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

THE UNKNOWN CITIZEN

(To JS/07 M 378
This Marble Monument
Is Erected by the State)

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn’t a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Installment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

(To read more of Auden, especially his poem about Bruegel's paintings, click on his name in the "labels" below.)

Transplanting

(Spring — March, April, May, 1565 by Peter Bruegel
the Elder, 1529?-1569, Dutch landscape painter)

This painting is one of Bruegel’s intriguing glimpses of life in the Netherlands during the sixteenth-century. (Click on the image to see an enlarged version of the picture.) It is in two parts, reflecting the divisions of the society. At the top, in the back, by the manor house, is life as experienced by the landowner and his family and friends, dressed in their finery, feasting, dancing, and listening to music. Across the moat, in the foreground, lies the French formal garden of this wealthy family. The farm workers are tending to the grain and fruit crops, the lambs and calves, the bees for honey and wax, and the sheep for wool. Connecting the two worlds is the lady of the manor, seen guiding the planting of seeds as she stands by the worker on the ladder at the right.

TRANSPLANTING

Watching hands transplanting,
Turning and tamping,
Lifting the young plants with two fingers,
Sifting in a palm-full of fresh loam, —
One swift movement, —
Then plumping in the bunched roots,
A single twist of the thumbs, a tamping and turning,
All in one,
Quick on the wooden bench,
A shaking down, while the stem stays straight,
Once, twice, and a faint third thump, —
Into the flat-box it goes,
Ready for the long days under the sloped glass:

The sun warming the fine loam,
The young horns winding and unwinding,
Creaking their thin spines,
The underleaves, the smallest buds
Breaking into nakedness,
The blossoms extending
Out into the sweet air,
The whole flower extending outward,
Stretching and reaching.

~ Theodore Roethke (1903-1963), American poet

Children’s Games

(Children’s Games by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1529?-1569,
Dutch landscape painter; click on the image to see an
enlarged version)

Last October, we looked at ekphrasis, or literary commentary about a work of art. The poem today is one of the ten that William Carlos Williams wrote about Bruegel the Elder’s paintings. You can read more of these poems by clicking on his name in the “labels” below.

(To read poems by other poets on this theme of ekphrasis, click on the month of October in the archives in the column to the right.)

CHILDREN’S GAMES

I

This is a schoolyard
crowded
with children

of all ages near a village
on a small stream
meandering by

where some boys
are swimming
bare-ass

or climbing a tree in leaf
everything
is motion

elder women are looking
after the small
fry

a play wedding a
christening
nearby one leans

hollering
into
an empty hogshead

II

Little girls
whirling their skirts about
until they stand out flat

tops pinwheels
to run in the wind with
or a toy in 3 tiers to spin

with a piece
of twine to make it go
blindman's-buff follow the

leader stilts
high and low tipcat jacks
bowls hanging by the knees

standing on your head
run the gauntlet
a dozen on their backs

feet together kicking
through which a boy must pass
roll the hoop or a

construction
made of bricks
some mason has abandoned


III

The desperate toys
of children
their

imagination equilibrium
and rocks
which are to be

found
everywhere
and games to drag

the other down
blindfold
to make use of

a swinging
weight
with which

at random
to bash in the
heads about

them
Brueghel saw it all
and with his grim

humor faithfully
recorded
it

~ William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), American poet and practicing physician

Hunters in the Snow

(Hunters in the Snow, 1565, by Peter Bruegel the Elder,
1529?-1569, Dutch landscape painter)

In October, we looked at different examples of ekphrasis, or literary commentary about a work of art. (Scroll down to that month’s poems in the “blog archives” in the column to the right.)

The first verse below is one of ten poems that William Carlos Williams wrote about paintings by Bruegel the Elder.

THE HUNTERS IN THE SNOW

The over-all picture is winter
icy mountains
in the background the return

from the hunt it is toward evening
from the left
sturdy hunters lead in

their pack the inn-sign
hanging from a
broken hinge is a stag a crucifix

between his antlers the cold
inn yard is
deserted but for a huge bonfire

that flares wind-driven tended by
women who cluster
about it to the right beyond

the hill is a pattern of skaters
Brueghel the painter
concerned with it all has chosen

a winter-struck bush for his
foreground to
complete the picture

~ William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), American poet and practicing physician

John Berryman’s poem about the same painting adds a more fateful scenario, in the future, viewed retrospectively.

WINTER LANDSCAPE

The three men coming down the winter hill
In brown, with tall poles and a pack of hounds
At heel, through the arrangement of the trees,
Past the five figures at the burning straw,
Returning cold and silent to their town,
Returning to the drifted snow, the rink
Lively with children, to the older men,
The long companions they can never reach,
The blue light, men with ladders, by the church
The sledge and shadow in the twilit street,

Are not aware that in the sandy time
To come, the evil waste of history
Outstretched, they will be seen upon the brow
Of that same hill: when all their company
Will have been irrecoverably lost,

These men, this particular three in brown
Witnessed by birds will keep the scene and say
By their configuration with the trees,
The small bridge, the red houses and the fire,
What place, what time, what morning occasion

Sent them into the wood, a pack of hounds
At heel and the tall poles upon their shoulders,
Thence to return as now we see them and
Ankle-deep in snow down the winter hill
Descend, while three birds watch and the fourth flies.

~ John Berryman (1917-1972), American poet

Fall of Icarus

The Roman poet Ovid (43 B.C.-A.D. 17 or 18) published his great poem Metamorphoses around A.D. 8. It was a 15-volume collection of Greek and Roman myths narrating the history of the world, from its beginnings up to the deification of Julius Caesar and the reign of Augustus.

One of the myths Ovid tells is the story of Icarus and his father, Daedalus, a great Athenian artisan. They were imprisoned on Crete. To escape to Sicily, Daedalus made two pairs of wings from feathers and wax. He cautioned his son not to fly too close over the sea, the feathers would get drenched, and not to fly too close to the sun, the wax would melt. But Icarus climbed too high and the wax melted and he fell to the sea and drowned.

Pieter Bruegel (or Brueghel) the Elder’s painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus is this Dutch painter's version of the well-known tale. He includes details from the description of the scene in Metamorphoses:

Some angler catching his fish with a quivering rod,
Or a shepherd leaning on his crook,
Or a ploughman resting on the handles of his plough . . .


(Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by Pieter Bruegel
the Elder, 1529?-1569)

W. H. Auden wrote a poem about this picture after a visit to the Museum of Beaux Arts in Brussels in 1938. He begins by alluding to two other paintings by Bruegel:


(The Census at Bethlehem by Pieter Bruegel the Elder)


(Christ Carrying the Cross by Pieter Bruegel the Elder)

In these three paintings, Bruegel shows how life goes on for the crowds — even in the midst of great drama. In Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, the ploughman and the others are oblivious to the flailing limbs of the drowning man (at the bottom right corner of the painting). In The Census of Bethlehem, Mary and Joseph arrive to record their names, just before “the miraculous birth” of Jesus. At the center of Christ Carrying the Cross, there is great suffering as “the dreadful martyrdom must run its course.”

Witnesses can be blind to the human suffering around them. But the artist pays attention.

MUSÉE 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.

~ W. H. Auden (1907-1973), English-born American poet and essayist

William Carlos Williams also wrote about this painting of Icarus, one of ten poems he composed about the works of Bruegel the Elder. (See the post of September 10, Grain Harvest.)

FALL OF ICARUS

According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring

a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry

of the year was
awake tingling
near

the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself

sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning

~ William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), American poet and practicing physician

Grain Harvest

(Grain Harvest by Pieter Bruegel the Elder)

Pieter Bruegel, or Breughel, the Elder (1529?-1569) was an artist from the Netherlands who painted landscapes of rural and village life with great detail and a touch of satire. His son and his grandson, both also called Pieter, followed in his footsteps.

This poem is one of ten that William Carlos Williams wrote about Bruegel the Elder’s paintings.

THE CORN HARVEST

Summer!
the painting is organized
about a young

reaper enjoying his
noonday rest
completely

relaxed
from his morning labors
sprawled

in fact sleeping
unbuttoned
on his back

the women
have brought him his lunch
perhaps

a spot of wine
they gather gossiping
under a tree

whose shade
carelessly
he does not share the

resting
center of
their workday world

~ William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), American poet and practicing physician