W.H. Auden wrote a famous poem, “Musee des Beaux Arts,” about some paintings, especially Breughel’s “Fall of Icarus,” which hang in the main museum in Brussels. I’ve just had the odd experience of looking at that painting in that museum.

Auden begins by saying, “About suffering they were never wrong, the old masters.” Why? Because they showed it in the midst of the welter and indifference of daily life. Torturers–Breughel did a “Massacre of the Innocents”–ride horses, who scratch their behinds on trees while the dirty work is going on. (That picture is in the museum too–two of them, by father and son.) When Icarus fell into the sea, a passing ship must have seen “something amazing,” but had “somewhere to get to,” and sailed on.

I don’t think I could have stood in Auden’s literal footsteps. He saw the painting in the thirties, and the gallery it’s in now looks newish, so it must have been rehung. But he looked at it, in the same institution, and wrote about it; and I read him, and now I looked at it too.

Ovid wrote the story once upon a time; and now I’ve written about it. Sorry for the decrescendo.