Poetry!

I chose this poem to analyze for an English paper and it was COOL.

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 must always 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 cornor, 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 foresaken 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.

So, why was it cool? The Musee des Beaux Arts = the Musee royal des Beaux Arts de Belgique in Brussels. It is the home of Breughel's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. The coolness comes in here - I had been a bit confused about the entire first sentence. Seriously, I thought, where did this stuff about dogs and torturers and horses with the itchy butts come from? Then, while looking through a collection of Breughel's works, I saw The Census of Bethlehem (containing a pregnant Mary, a dude opening a window, and a bunch of kids skating) and the Massacre of the Innocents (dogs and a knight on a horse by a tree in the bottom right corner). Better, they're both at the Musee, too.

I love finding things that allow you to imagine the situation surrounding the conception of a creative work.

Yes! And Mrs. B says my analysis of sound devices and structure rocked her socks (my words). AND she didn't get angry when I called Auden a little raincloud. Overall, this paper writing experience rates a 10, I think.