The Ogre does what ogres
can,
Deeds quite impossible for
Man,
But one prize is beyond
his reach,
The Ogre cannot master
Speech:
About a subjugated plain,
Among its desperate and
slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands
on hips,
While drivel gushes from
his lips.
--WH Auden, August 1968
When I
saw the remarkable picture above, and in particular the
mostly-peaceful young gentleman in the silvery mask, I thought of
Auden's ogre. Auden wrote his poem in response to the Soviets'
crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968. Our ogres, like his, are very
good at causing chaos and destruction, but utterly incapable of, and
uninterested in, speaking clearly and understandably.
8 comments:
Thanks, Mumps. My favorite Auden is Death's Echo. I've known parts of that by heart for 40 years or so.
That's a new one to me, chickelit, and worth reading. Thanks.
Leary of being punked, I was unwilling at first-glance to read more into this one, fearing it to be an aberration posted by someone skilled in the art of deviation.
After figuring out it was the real deal, I went back for a more solemn read.
My two favorite Auden lines are the ones that begin and end the poem in which Breughel's painting of Icarus is mentioned:
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...
...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.
I first found it twenty-five years ago in a book of writings on Death, purchased after my father's immediate and unexpected passing following a backward fall down a staircase at his dental office as he was cleaning it out in prep for retirement (at 80 years of age!). He'd stopped by our house earlier that morning to borrow our old El Camino (known as the "Saturday Truck") and I'd heard, through the window, him and MrM talking together as he picked up the keys. Three hours later, while the rest of the world was going about their Saturday business, I stood alongside a gurney holding his unconscious body, looking at X-rays of his fractured skull as his organs slowed to a stop. I didn't know then how to enter into or hold the enormity of that moment nor the commonness of it: and it wasn't until I found through the words of another about a different fall and death, the understanding needed to help settle my heart.
Thanks for this touchback to something that mattered, and for the two new-to-me poems it gathered!
Musée 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.
I watched the movie Four Weddings and a Funeral and there was an Auden poem read by a character. Depressing as hell. That ol' boy needed to cheer the eff up!
Looks like the poem containing the Stop the Clock directive read at the Funeral in 4W&F started off a lyrics for a song, which then became part of a play entitled The Ascent of F6, co-authored by Auden about politics, which accounts for the dramatic tone, with those same words later taken as serious.
...two of the play’s proponents of what Auden would later call ‘international wrong’ sing an elegy for the dead Sir James: ‘Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, / Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone’.
The words are the same, but the feeling could not be further from the personal pathos of the poem in Four Weddings: here, the atmosphere is surreal, full of disgusted political disillusion, and all the professions of emotion are corrupted by an entanglement with serious power. The poem is a ragged, satirically pantomimic version of the ostentatious trumpery involved in a state funeral: ‘Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead / Scribbling on the sky the message: He is dead.’
Are there bonus points for finding mention of Trumpery and Gunn in commentary on Auden?
If so: The last three stanzas in the F6 text refer to characters in the play killed during the disastrous attempt on the mountain:
Hold up your umbrellas to keep off the rain
From Doctor Williams while he opens a vein;
Life, he pronounces, it is finally extinct.
Sergeant, arrest that man who said he winked!
Shawcross will say a few words sad and kind
To the weeping crowds about the Master-Mind,
While Lamp with a powerful microscope
Searches their faces for a sign of hope.
And Gunn, of course, will drive the motor-hearse:
None could drive it better, most would drive it worse.
He’ll open up the throttle to its fullest power
And drive him to the grave at ninety miles an hour.
Well, that made me smile. Along with the following, turning up as the humorful and homophonic ending to the search pertaining to cheering the eff up: In one of his Shakespeare essays contained in The Dyer’s Hand, Auden indicated that “laughing and loving have certain properties in common, and that “real laughter is absolutely unaggressive.” A few years before his death, he wrote that “man is the only creature who laughs. True laughter is not to be confused with the superior titter of the intellect, though we are capable, alas, of that, too.” When he was still a young man, he had, with a touch of humor, written, “My deepest feeling about politicians is that they are dangerous lunatics to be avoided when possible and carefully humored.” Always appreciative of multi-word meanings—he loved looking through the Oxford English Dictionary—he might not have minded one saying that for the rest of his life he continued to believe that politics and politicians should be “humored.”
And if there's no points for Trumpery and Gunn, I'll fall back with a second rendition in poetry on the Fall of Icarus by a different author, conveying a spareness I also appreciate.
William Carlos Williams
According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring
a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry
of the year was
awake tingling
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
Pieter Brueghel, The Fall of Icarus
Oil-tempera, 29 inches x 44 inches. Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels.
Good one, MamaM. I looked up that painting and then I had to read about it to even discover where ol' Icky even was. Turns out that in an earlier version even Ic's ol' daddy was in the picture, but he flew away in the later version.
I like Northern European paintings - they remind me of the Midwest Regionalists, which makes sense since they studied those works.
I like the fact that the splash on the canvas named for the subject is so small in the big picture, it's hard to find.
Also appreciate what eye and ear function you have, SixtyG, as you still seem able to see and hear something in the larger scheme of things. Without your comment, recalling the FW&F poem and noting something off in the tone, I wouldn't have looked for the rest of the story which accounts for its over the top intensity. Different from the Icarus observation which comes through as strong enough to be memorable, yet still invites.
As for the Ogre poem, I'd shared it with the younger SonM over a dinner that involved a discussion of the Kenosha, WI rioting that he'd sent me a live feed link to at 1AM Monday morning. And he asked as he was leaving for the name of the author and poem again.
Such is the power of a post, a comment, and apt words set to rhyme, in and out of time!
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