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 137: Emily Dickinson's "A narrow Fellow in the Grass"
Episode 136: William Wordsworth's "Ode"
Episode 135: William Wordsworth's "Ode", sections 9-11
Episode 134: William Wordsworth's "Ode", sections 7-8
Episode 133: William Wordsworth's "Ode", sections 5-6
Episode 132: William Wordsworth's "Ode", sections 3-4
Episode 131: William Wordsworth's "Ode", sections 1 & 2
Episode 130: Walt Whitman's "Darest Thou Now, O Soul"
Episode 129: Dylan Thomas' "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night"
Episode 128: Poems by Robert Frost and Wendell Berry
Episode 127: Michael Blumenthal's "For My Son, Reading Harry Potter"
Episode 126: Wendell Berry's "Manifesto: Mad Farmer Liberation Front"
Episode 125: John Donne's "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning"
Episode 124: Mary Oliver's "The Summer Day"
Episode 123: George Herbert's "Prayer (I)"
Episode 122: Sheenagh Pugh's "Sometimes"
Episode 121: Haiku by Bashō
Episode 120: Theodore Roethke's "Dolor"
Episode 119: Anne Bradstreet's "Upon my Son Samuel, His Going for England, November 6, 1657"
Episode 118: From Federico García Lorca's “Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias”
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