 |
| Rest of the Reapers, Pieter Brueghel, the younger |
STILLNESS
No sound beyond the dropping of the leaves
Or shushing in the treetops of the stirring
In the air and periodic whirring
Soft of wings and bundling of sheaves ––
Every now and then a bird may call
Looking for –– or longing for –– his mate;
Escaping still the hunter’s dinner plate.
Scythes swish steadily as grain grown tall
Submits to delicate compelling force.
Workers silently bent to their task
Over whom hot sunshine spills its rays
Reap swiftly knowing pain could come, of course.
Later, in the afterglow they’ll bask
Dreaming –– foolishly –– of better days.
~ FreeThinke
Wonderful imagery.
ReplyDeleteYou must thank Pieter Brueghel, the younger. He practically wrote the sonnet, himself, with very little input from me.
DeleteRest of the Reapers and other Brueghel paintings have impressed me since I first saw some of them in childhood.
A wonderfully old world man you are, FreeThinke.
ReplyDeleteJMJ
That I am, Jersey, and I'll take your words as a great compliment. I'm not quite a Luddite, but I see very clearly that much ugliness, clamor, din, toxic pollution, and a unique, new form of cruel exploitation (of those fated to slave away in "England's Dark Satanic Mills") came into the world with the advent of The Machine Age.
DeleteFor each ecstatic instant
We must an Anguish pay ––
In keen and quivering ratio
To the Ecstasy.
For each beloved Hour ––
Sharp pittances of Years ––
Bitter, contested Farthings ––
And Coffers heaped with Tears.
~ Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
Those words might well apply to nearly every facet of the Human Condition. No matter how hard we try, we can never escape from the shadows our presence casts.
The machines really did change the world, and they haven't made it an prettier.
DeleteJMJ
Scythes swish steadily
ReplyDeleteHearing the scythes sweep across the stalks in those words, FT.
Yes. I tried to capture in words an evocation of the sounds Brueghel's picture suggests the reapers must be hearing in that bucolic setting. To my modern, traumatized ears the aural images seem idyllic.
DeleteMy point, of course, in writing the sonnet on the acrostic Noise Pollution was to suggest that those field hands in all likelihood never knew how well off they really were, and that much of what-we-like-to-call "Progress" has done very little to fulfill human longings and alleviate suffering. It has in fact expanded and exacerbated it in many ways some of which most of us remain unaware even though the adverse effects have been universal.
Nice picture. Whose?
ReplyDeleteMusee Des Beaux Arts
ReplyDeleteby 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.
Cryptic though he may be at times I love Auden. Thank you for that.
DeleteDo you see any sort of "object lesson" we might draw from the tale of Icarus? I fancy it an early version of the Tower of Babel, myself. Possibly even the Titanic much later on.
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus>
DeleteAccording 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
~ William Carlos Williams
AND to COMPLETE the REFERENCE
Delete_______ Lines on Brueghel’s Icarus ______
The ploughman ploughs, the fisherman dreams of fish;
Aloft, the sailor, through a world of ropes
Guides tangled meditations, feverish
With memories of girls forsaken, hopes
Of brief reunions, new discoveries,
Past rum consumed, rum promised, rum potential.
Sheep crop the grass, lift up their heads and gaze
Into a sheepish present: the essential,
Illimitable juiciness of things,
Greens, yellows, browns are what they see.
Churlish and slow, the shepherd, hearing wings —
Perhaps an eagle’s–gapes uncertainly;
Too late. The worst has happened: lost to man,
The angel, Icarus, for ever failed,
Fallen with melted wings when, near the sun
He scorned the ordering planet, which prevailed
And, jeering, now slinks off, to rise once more.
But he–his damaged purpose drags him down —
Too far from his half-brothers on the shore,
Hardly conceivable, is left to drown.
~ Michael Hamburger (1924-2007)
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus is a painting in oil on canvas (28.9 in × 44.1 in) long thought to be by Pieter Bruegel.
ReplyDeleteHowever, following technical examinations in 1996 that attribution is regarded as very doubtful, and the painting is now usually regarded as a good early copy by an unknown artist of Bruegel's original, perhaps painted in the 1560s, although recent technical research has re-opened that question too.
Largely derived from Ovid, the painting is described in W. H. Auden's famous poem Musée des Beaux-Arts, named after the museum in which the painting is housed in Brussels, and became the subject of a poem of the same name by William Carlos Williams, as well as Lines on Bruegel's "Icarus" by Michael Hamburger. WIKI
Interesting that Auden appears to have misspelled Brueghel's name. It may be spelt minus the h, which in some circles seems to be preferred, but I've never seen it represented as BREUGHEL before.
ReplyDeleteA typo? A misprint? An editorial oddity? Intentional on Auden's part? A BRITISH spelling? I must check other editions and see if "BREUGHEL" runs that way through all.
OKAY! One of those oddities that's correct either way. Apparently, Pieter Brueghel the Younger, signed his name Breughel after the year 1616. Before it had been Pieter Brueghel.
DeleteOf course, as all should know, spelling was not standardized at this time. In England it was looked upon as a mark of extreme cleverness and erudition to spell words in common use in as many different ways as one could imagine.
How times change!
Your poem is beautiful, FT. That picture obviously made a great impression on you. You captured the feeling of peace very well.
ReplyDeleteMarion Brambler