Memorizing

The calendar has flipped over into September, a cool clear morning here in Kentucky. Time for summer to begin closing down, time for George W. Bush to come back to Washington and roll out his new product line: war with Iran.

But wait! He doesn’t have Karl Rove anymore.

So maybe he’ll have to settle for a new savings and loan bailout.

Sorry, that should be mortgage bailout, and I guess because he has no brothers involved in this one, his efforts seem tepid.

Meanwhile, I think I’ll start my month of poetry memorizing with this one from Auden. I have always admired it. Though its language might not be as intricately woven as something like Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73, it is nevertheless masterfully crafted,and it seems, in tone and content, very appropriate to our times. How awful is the innocence of that horse, as innocence is awful. And somehow that boy falling from the sky this morning makes me think of our W.

May the world survive to sail on. We certainly have someplace to get to.

Musée des Beaux Arts

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.

— W. H. Auden

Postscript: I need to mention that the idea for memorizing a poem a week in September came from Deborah Ager at the 32 Poems Magazine blog. If you’re looking for some suggestions to jump-start your list, check out the suggestions at A Poem That Keeps Calling to You.

Possibly related posts:

“woozy, reckless through the barricades”

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