Like his son-poet, a father-poet composing a life
Icarus is still at our poetry party, our Poemapalooza for National Poetry Month, in this one about Auden about Icarus. Icarus has not yet left the building. He is still falling, ever falling, always falling, in the poems of many poets – like a Grecian urn, always circling.
As if having a son for a poet weren’t enough, William Matthews was a renowned poet himself, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1995, among other accolades. There must have been poetry all around for that family, a life of words, wordplay, wordboys, I imagine, a lot of meaning-making at the dinner table, perhaps. The elder Matthews, now gone dead too young, brings us back to Auden and that Breughel painting of Icarus.
In Memory of W. H. Auden1.
His heart made a last fist.
The language has used him
well and passed him through.
We get what he collected.
The magpie shines, burns
in the face of the polished stone.
2.
His was a mind alive by a pure greed
for reading, for the book
which "is a mirror,"
as Lichtenberg said: "if an ass
peers into it, you can’t expect
an apostle to look out."
It was a mediating mind.
There were the crowds like fields of waving wheat
and there was the Rilkean fire
he didn’t like
at the bottom of the night.
He loomed back and forth.
The space shrank.
The dogs of Europe wolved
about the house,
darks defining a campfire.
3.
My friend said Auden died
because his face
invaded his body.
Under the joke is a myth —
we invent our faces:
the best suffer most and it shows.
But what about the face
crumpled by a drunk’s Buick?
Or Auden’s
face in its fugue of photographs
so suddenly resolved?
It isn’t suffering that eats us.
4.
They were not painting about suffering,
the Old Masters. Not the human heart but
Brueghel turns the plowman away
for compositional reasons
and smooths the waters for a ship he made
expensive and delicate.
The sun is implied by how
the sure hand makes the light fall
as long as we watch the painting.
The sure hand is cruel.
