The Mad Poets Blog

The other day for some reason I needed to refer to my indispensable Oxford Book of English Verse. In the process of leafing through its pages I met a couple of old friends—poems  I enjoy so much that it was impossible for me to be reminded of their existence and not permit myself to read them. Now, while there are many poems I feel similarly passionate about, the absolute number of such poems compared to the number of poems I have ever read remains remarkably small. So I thought it might be worthwhile having a closer look at the two poems and trying to come to some conclusions as to what it is about each of them that makes them irresistible to me.

The first poem is “Musee des Beaux Arts” by Wystan Hugh Auden. I’m sure many people number an Auden poem among their favorites and perhaps it is not that one, but to me this poem is just perfect. In one sense of the word it is an ekphrastic poem, the relevant work of art being Breughel’s Icarus, but whereas failed ekphrastic poems merely evoke or describe the work of art, this poem glosses the painting, communicating the same essential human truth. In the painting all you can see of Icarus is his tiny disappearing legs; in the foreground “the ploughman may/ Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, / But for him it was not an important failure.”
This harks back to the opening few lines, how the Old Masters knew that suffering:

…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 must always be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating.”

It is a marvelously understated poem—the tone of the language echoes the unimpressed nature of the bystanders. The torturer’s horse, for example, “Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.” Auden also uses a very unrestricted form: loosely iambic lines of varying lengths carry end rhymes that are modest but unexpected (abcadedbfgfgehhijkkij.)
The temptation that the contemporary poet must avoid in today’s lurid tabloid era is to write poems leaking with confessional hyperbole, the kind of poem that would be to “Musee des Beaux Arts” what a still from a blockbuster horror movie is to Breughel’s Icarus. We could all benefit from learning how to create more drama within what is being less explicitly shown, as this means the reader has to work harder and in doing so bonds more fully with the poem:

…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.

The second poem is Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess.” Critics have historically been unkind to Browning, rating his work inferior (and less ‘poetic’) than his wife Elizabeth’s. He certainly privileges plot over lyricism, and much of his work is in dramatic monologues like ‘My Last Duchess,” which, with its heroic couplet form, could almost be a vignette from a play, but what a vignette!

That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now: Fra Pandolf’s hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.

Here again we have a poem which references a painting, in this case an imaginary portrait of the narrator’s dead wife. Using just sixty lines Browning manages to have his unreliable narrator convey the tragic story of the marriage in such a way that we are entirely conscious of the wife’s character, the narrator’s character and also shiveringly aware of his part in her death:

…Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt,
Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without
Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands
As if alive.”

I can’t help thinking that Robert Frost must have drawn on Browning in developing his own style of narrative characterizing poems. I have certainly benefited from both Frost and Browning to inform my own narrative works.
Perhaps that’s one reason these two poems hold such irresistible appeal to me. In these poems the poet is holding out a hand, making a connection with me not just as a reader but as a pupil. Every time I read these poems I find myself studying them anew, examining them to see if I can understand a little bit more of the magic that makes them work, with a view maybe, just maybe, to working a little of that magic myself.