Neoclassical and Romantic Readings Due 10/7-10/8

Poetry Prospectus Part 2 is now due on Monday, October 13 or Tuesday the 14th. Rejoice!

608 Description of Morning
609 Essay on Man
614 Clod and Pebble
619 Lines
624 She Walks…
626 Ode to the West Wind
628 When I have fears…
632 Grecian Urn

If you'd like to get started thinking about your second out of class essay, here is the poem that it will be based on:

Musee des Beaux Arts*

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.

W.H. Auden

*Museum of fine arts