W H Auden - Musée des Beaux Arts lyrics

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 pa**ionately 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