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The Inspiration
The Inspiration
The painting below is called “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus”
W.H. Auden used this painting as the inspiration for his poem Musee des Beaux Arts.
The Assignment:
Visit classroom.google.com for your assignment
The poem “Musee des Beaux Arts” was inspired by, and alludes to, ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus”.
For this activity, you must find a work of art and write a poem inspired by it. Avoid simply describing the work of art. Let it be your muse.
Your poem can be about the artwork in any number of ways....you figure it out.
You can find a work of art online, or take something from my collection.
Include a picture of the piece of art on the document with your poem.
Give your poem a title
Turn in to Google Classroom
MUSEE DES BEAUX ARTS
Musee des Beaux Arts
By 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.
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