Truth-Telling in Poetry and Art

The Horrors of War and Human Complacency

the Fall of Icarus by Pieter Bruegel

Elisa Gabbert wrote a brilliant piece in The New York Times about how human suffering and complacency go hand-in-hand. It was published a year ago when the war in Ukraine dominated the news, featuring the poetry of Auden and paintings of Bruegel. Now, along with the atrocities taking place in Ukraine, we have those in Gaza and Haiti bringing us new images of horror.

How do we contend with this?

Do we look away and go on with our busy lives, or fail to look at all, as Bruegel’s paintings depict in The Census at Bethlehem and The Fall of Icarus? As Auden writes about in his poem below?

Both artists engaged in a kind of dark truth-telling. The glorious occasion of Christ’s birth is juxtaposed against the skating children oblivious to the coming slaughter by Herod’s hand. The terrible fall of Icarus goes unnoticed in the ploughman’s sunny landscape, and the ship that could have saved him sails blithely on.

Musee des Beaux Arts
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.

The Census at Bethlehem by Pieter Bruegel

Below is another truth-telling that Auden wrote about the day after Hitler invaded Poland. It’s a long poem so I’ve included only the beginning and ending. You can read the whole poem at this link.

September 1, 1939

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

Horror at a world gone wrong is hard to sustain. It dulls, it grows weary, it descends to drudgery. The mind drifts. Life goes on. The sun continues to rise. We need its warmth and comfort. The trill of the songbird still thrills us. We need this too.

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, another poet wrote. We will. We have no choice. The plowing, the skating, the wine and the laughter must go on.

Isn’t that our fervent wish for the people of Ukraine, that they regain this normalcy? That the people of Gaza and Haiti shall also, someday, enjoy the peace and prosperity of those who now sit drinking lattes in outdoor cafes while reading of the horror taking place elsewhere in the world.

The joy and sorrow, beauty and brutality of the human condition are woven into one seamless tapestry, glorious on one side and a hopeless tangle of knots on the other. All a matter of perspective, which side we are looking at in the moment.

Auden once said that the only true value of poetry and art is in the truth-telling that dis-enchants and dis-intoxicates.

Well, that’s one value of truth-telling, for sure. But turn it over, and on the other side is the truth-telling that enchants and intoxicates. Both are necessary. Or, especially in times like these, at least a glimmer of hope. Or a call to “love each other,” as Auden says we must.

Even Auden’s dark truth-telling ends with that bright, “ironic,” but “affirming flame.”