Rebecca O’Connor – The Magician: Musée des Beaux Arts by W.H.Auden

Breugel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus up on the white board, bright strips of classroom light reflected in the dark windows, our flickering pens. Michael reading Auden’s ‘Musee des Beaux Arts’, where the dogs go on with their doggy life as Icarus falls.

His incantations, effortless gadgetry. This – and this – and this! Poetry magicking things, like love, into existence.

I came to the class with just one notion: to write something about a snow globe. That’s all I can recall now. I could write nothing good for as long as I was in his class, or for ages afterwards. I needed to let it percolate, find what it was I wanted to say.

Then the news of his passing, the grave silence that followed …

Yesterday, while a baby was baptised in the waves, and two children filled their buckets with sand, a refugee drowned just metres from the shore.

I thought of Icarus, splashing into the sea like a spent teabag while a fisherman’s line tautens, a shepherd looks for signs of rain, a farmer daintily ploughs on, of how Michael distilled all life into those classroom nights – our future, from which we turned to look at him, swirling around us in great arcs of fake glittering snow.

Musee des Beaux Arts by 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 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.