Life Goes On // Samantha Tedder

     According to W.H. Auden, life goes on. While you might be at a pivotal point in your life that could change its course forever, someone else is having the least eventful night of their lives. As someone is grieving the most significant loss they will experience, you can also be receiving the news of your dreams. All of life is happening at once. All life is significant to the individual and insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Although, I believe all are significant in the eyes of God.  Auden communicates this through poetry, specifically in Musée des Beaux-Arts and. 

    Musée des Beaux-Arts, translates to Muesem of Fine Arts. The poem given this title entails comments on grief, life, death, and the slow march of time. In the first stanza, Auden lists several highs and lows of life that need and influence each other without ever meeting. The babe prayed for by those leaving this earth, hoping that they could improve what was left to them. A world never asked for, only to be taken on when life becomes real and a child steps out into it to leave their mark. Within this nature exists, without a care for the world that always influences it. In the second stanza, he remarks how Breughel's painting Icarus visually encapsulates this idea. As Icurase eternally falls in the background, his father always watches him fall. His father, who will move past this moment, while grieved, he is more than his son's fall. The farmer in the foreground, unaware of the tragedy unfolding over his shoulder, is concerned with what matters to him. What does he care of some foolish, arrogant boy falling from the sky? He has fields to plow and mouths to feed. Both are significant to themselves and insignificant to the other. A guess can be made that Icarus did not take account of all those around him moving on with life as he fell but rather how quickly the green waves grew to swallow him. 

    In Memory of W.B. Yeats, while containing the same ideas, is much darker. Auden is writing on someone much more real to him than the Greek myth of Icarus and humanity in general. Within the poem, Auden is writing about Yeats but poetry in general as well. Yeats' thoughts, dead in body, is not dead in voice, "The words of a dead man Are modified in the guts of the living.” (Lines 22-23) His writing outlives him. The Mad Ireland that Yeats wrote about and lived in is now forever influenced by him though no river has stopped flowing, no mountain is moved, it is a post-Yeats Ireland. Yeats voice is now to be taken in and redistributed on the lips of Ireland's people. According to the last stanza, the earth itself should mourn receiving a body emptied of its poetry as Yeats is laid in it. The influence of poetry is felt by many the day Yeats dies, as like many do, you head the words of those important much more when they are gone. The expectation for more leaves, and so you hold dear what was given. 

Auden's two poems, beautifully capture the overlapping complexities and mundane of life as time always marches on. 

P.S. I commented on Lily Caswell and Emory Cooper's posts.