Reflecting on suffering in the world, and how terrible things for certain people’s lives are insignificant to other people. He uses the example of the Breughel painting “The Fall of Icarus,” where a man is plowing his field and the splash of Icarus falling out of the sky and into the water is largely insignificant. This is the same painting that William Carlos Williams talks about in his poem ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus’ that we talked about earlier. The line of ”how everything turns away quite leisurely away from disaster captures the main idea of this work, since these tragedies like Icarus are easily forgotten. They are not denied or ignored, just as how the Old Masters of art that he speaks about do capture them in their works, however they just have a place in the works but are not this perpetual thing that fills everyone with doom. This suffering is a passing feeling, where the “martyrdom must run its course” for everything else to be. It is a part of a whole but a part that some people can see as insignificant or easily ignorable when they are not the ones suffering. The line talking about the torturer’s horse innocently scratching its behind was also particularly interesting since the horse here is an unknowing agent that is technically a part of the suffering although the horse itself is innocent and not understanding of what the torturer is doing.
Hi Pete! I like what you said at the end of your post about the horse. I think that the horse’s innocence also reflects on the speaker’s statement that suffering is a human phenomenon in line 3. The horse itself is innocent because it is unaware of the torture like you said, and I think it is interesting to consider what this tells us about the differences between humans and other animals. The speaker puts the dogs in line 11 and the horse in line 13 at a lower place in the moral hierarchy, by claiming that suffering is a human phenomenon. This seems somewhat problematic because just as the horse doesn’t understand our human suffering, we may not understand the horse’s suffering. It also seems problematic that the horse is granted innocence by the speaker because this could be extended to any other (potentially human) agent that is unknowing but indirectly used to create suffering.
I also think it’s interesting to think about how the poem discusses the insignificance of humans in general–and how something happening to a human, in the scope of the universe, has virtually no meaning. I think the poem gets at this idea in the beginning when it says that it is “human position” (line 3) to be living a personal, small life amidst so many other people with their own lives. Like Julia talks about in her comment, I think there is some moral hierarchy discussed about humans’ position in the universe in this poem as well. Although the poet may not have believed this when they wrote the poem, I think looking at the poem in the contemporary context of humans becoming more aware of the ways in which we harm the environment is an interesting perspective. Maybe, in that way, you could read the poem as a statement about the power of time and movement and that nothing, not even a death or disaster happening in one person’s life, can derail that. Good job!
I like how you talk about how people tend to turn away or ignore suffering when it’s not happening to them. I think it’s really interesting how this poem, unlike Williams’s, is not only talking about the painting. It first takes you through the museum and references pictures that aren’t in the painting, addressing art more generally than Williams but focusing on the same painting. It makes the first stanza more interesting, where you don’t necessarily know if Auden is thinking about different paintings from the Old Masters or imagining what might by happening behind closed doors in “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.”