Recorded sitting next to some trickling water just outside the mouth of Hellhole Canyon, in Ivins, Utah. In part, my analysis was a chance for me to talk a little about my process in reading a poem—the messy stuff that gets cut out in my editing.
Because not only do I typically record things in a single take and live on a hike, I also don't use any notes or any script. I have, of course, read and thought about the poem, but I don't have a written plan: I read the poem and then talk about it, just like I would if you were on the hike with me. What happens in editing is that I take out long pauses where I think, or I remove false starts. Sometimes I'll get two minutes into an idea and then realize that what I'm talking about is invalidated by a word or phrase that I hadn't understood before.
That's how it goes with many things, isn't it? We start off with a rough idea about where we are headed, but only along the way do we actually figure it out. If you don't believe me, [take Alan Jacobs's word for it](https://blog.ayjay.org/my-writing-advice/).
Anyway, that's my process.
For this poem in particular, you might be interested in [seeing the painting that Auden is talking about](https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/landscape-with-the-fall-of-icarus).
#### TEXT OF POEM
"Musée des Beaux Arts" by W. H. Auden
_December 1938_
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 Brueghel'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.
Episode 308: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "My Cathedral"
Episode 307: Amy Lowell's "Fenway Park: Study in Orange and Silver"
Episode 306: Margaret Atwood's "You Begin"
Episode 305: Shakespeare's Sonnet 126
Episode 304: Emily Dickinson's "Tell all the truth but tell it slant"
Episode 303: Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Spring"
Episode 302: Mary Oliver's "Why I Wake Early"
Episode 301: Donald Justice's "Men at Forty"
Episode 300: Billy Collins' "The Effort"
Episode 205: Shakespeare's sonnet 20
Episode 204: Edwin Arlington Robinson's "Cliff Klingenhagen"
Episode 203: Shakespeare's sonnet 18
Episode 202: George Herbert's "Easter Wings"
Episode 201: Shakespeare's sonnet 3
Episode 200: "How Frugal is the Chariot"
Episode 142: "Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me"
Episode 141: "yes I said yes I will yes"
Episode 140: "I Should Know What God and Man Is"
Episode 139: Edgar Lee Master's "Lucinda Matlock"
Episode 138: Walt Whitman's "I Hear It Was Charged Against Me"
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