♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ PETER SACKS: "About suffering, they were never wrong, the old Masters."

DAVID BROOKS: "How well they understood its human position."

SACKS: "How well they understood its human position."

♪ ♪ "How it takes place..." SAMANTHA POWER: "While someone else is eating, or opening a window, or just walking dully along."

♪ ♪ (gunfire) ELISA NEW: It's December 1938.

The young poet W.H.

Auden ponders Europe's descent once again into chaos.

(bombs whistling) It is only 20 years since the end of World War I.

But through the '30s, Auden has witnessed the atrocities of the war in Spain, civilians massacred in China, Hitler's troops on the march, and Jews, desperate for passports, looking to get out of Europe.

With suffering on his mind, Auden spends a day in the Musée des Beaux Arts in Brussels.

In one room, three paintings by the Dutch Master Brueghel draw his attention.

Each sets an ancient religious or mythological scene-- a scene of suffering in the most ordinary of Dutch squares.

In "The Census of Bethlehem," Mary and Joseph trudge unnoticed as children skate and townspeople go about their business.

In "The Massacre of the Innocents," armed soldiers aim their pikes while others watch on from their doorways.

And in "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus," a boy plunges into the ocean while a fisherman plays out his line and a ship sails by, and a ploughman ploughs.

Suffering happens while others look away.

BROOKS: One truth it contains is that suffering is an isolating experience-- that when you're suffering, others are not actually feeling what you're feeling, and that, therefore, you are, in some way, cut off from them.

They're going about their lives.

And even if they're looking at you and sympathizing with you, they're not quite there with you.

POWER: I think about the poem particularly with Syria with issue of displacement and how many mothers, you know, on the road are taking to a boat, a dinghy, with some creepy smuggler who does not have their best interest at heart, and knowing how vulnerable their children are, whether to bombing or to drowning, or, you know, whatever the horrific circumstance is.

SACKS: Suffering was very much in Auden's marrow, as particularly the 1930s went on, and he began to see what human power can do.

NEW: January 1939-- Auden leaves Europe for good.

His first volume published in the United States includes one of the greatest poems of the 20th century-- "Musée des Beaux Arts."

SACKS: "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."

SACKS: "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."

BROOKS: "Skating on a pond at the edge of the wood."

SACKS: "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."

BROOKS: "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."

POWER: "The ploughman may have heard the splash, "the forsaken cry, but for him, it was not an important failure."

SACKS: "The sun shone, as it had to, on the white legs disappearing into the green water, and the expensive, delicate ship that must've seen something amazing."

BROOKS: "A boy falling out of the sky"... "Had somewhere to get to"... "And sailed calmly on."

NEW: I'm struck by this first line-- "About suffering, they were never wrong," comma, next line, "the old Masters."

What would have been the difference, I wonder, if he had written, "The old Masters were never wrong about suffering"?

By putting "about suffering" first, the central character is suffering, and not the old Masters.

It's not like, "This is a poem...

I'm about to teach you about suffering."

It's not... "I'm not going to give you a poem about who the Masters are and how smart they were."

To begin the poem with the word "about" means that this poem is... it's a kind of opinion poem, it's an attitude poem.

And "about suffering"-- this isn't a poem of suffering, or in suffering; it's about one's position in relation to suffering.

He uses that word, position, which is a very cold, abstract word.

"How well they understood its human position."

There's a kind of casualness about that.

"About suffering, they were never wrong, the old Masters."

There's a fairly... a very civilized tone.

How does that line sit with you?

Well, I love the way he did it.

- Why?

Why do you love it?

- Because it doesn't fundamentally matter.

"The old Masters," I think, you know, refers to the artists, and so forth, whose paintings moved him, and... BROOKS: And the "old Masters" could be philosophers, it could be spiritual guides.

POWER: But also, they're the power brokers.

SACKS: And he had his own suspicions about their highfalutin position as visionaries.

POWER: The old Masters, they're both part of the description, but also part of the problem.

♪ ♪ There's a sort of blurring of... you know, they were never wrong, because they described it accurately, versus a righteous never-wrongness, you know.

To say they were never wrong suggests that you know what wrongness might be, and that you're somehow superior.

You can tell, "Oh, they were never wrong about this."

One hears somebody's attitude, somebody's tone.

Yes.

NEW: ...that might need to be adjusted in the course of the poem, and we hear that in "about suffering."

SACKS: Yes.

My feeling is that Auden is, I think, differentiating himself from the old Masters, and my sense is that he wanted to be a 20th century poet.

And one of the things that had happened in the 20th century, to his mind, was that suffering was becoming increasingly ordinary.

It was happening all around.

So they could afford never to be wrong.

But can we?

"How it takes place..." POWER: "While someone else is eating, or opening... BROOKS: "...a window, or just walking dully along."

We are asking governments to make a deeper commitment to funding U.N. and humanitarian organizations and appeals, and to welcome more refugees into their countries.

The truth is, certainly, that I feel my days reflected in this poem.

On the one hand, living with the knowledge, deep knowledge, of what is going on in a place like Aleppo, that is being shellacked, bombarded from the air, knowing that hospitals are being hit, that families are being shattered.

And then having my own kids, you know, coming back with their prosaic concerns from school relative to those of the kids in Aleppo, certainly.

The sunshine of New York City, the luxury of being the American ambassador to the U.N., we, meaning humanity, you know, tend to sigh and lament, and nobody wishes it to be such, you know, who's far away from it, and who knows of the suffering.

But it's just someone else's problem.

And the grind and distractions, but also the daily joys are our own, and not so clouded by the boy falling from the sky, as it were.

BROOKS: One person's suffering, the other person is just walking dully along.

NEW: Yeah, walking and opening... and the... those present, progressive verbs, you know, tell us life goes on.

SACKS: There's ploughing, there's disappearing into, there's skating.

And skating is wonderfully rhymed against... NEW: Against waiting.

SACKS: Yes.

And so they're reverently, passionately waiting.

These others are mastering the surface, the frozen surface of life in which they can just skate along.

Which will actually then play off against this disappearing into, the sinking of the boy through the water.

In a way, if the poem is devoted to the ongoingness of life, I think he's interested in the innocence that also coexists with darker elements of murderousness.

POWER: The truth is so much coexists at any given moment.

I mean even in Aleppo, while someone's... some mother's son is ending up in the ambulance with his dust-strewn face, some five-year-old boy, even there, someone is opening a window.

You know, and it just is the case that people are going along with their business, going along with their lives.

And so that juxtaposition is existing, even in the inferno itself.

NEW: We haven't talked a whole lot about words like "specially," "doggy," "leisurely," "dully."

"Anyhow."

It's such plain language, in addition to being such pedestrian activities.

Well, I think the juxtaposition of suffering, martyrdom, boy falling out of the sky, with the chipper, upbeat, folksy language is very deliberate and very... very powerful.

I notice "specially."

That's right.

There were always... yes, "must be children who did not specially want it to happen."

This happens to be the birth of Christ, the Christ child!

As though this event were not even important enough for a more elevated language.

Yes.

NEW: Right?

And that adverb, "dully," which is so offset against what you might imagine to be the high grip of suffering, it's one of several adverbs that he's seeding throughout the poem in ways that deflate.

NEW: What do you think?

- Well, I don't where the... what the "anyhow" means.

"That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course," is that period?

And then, "Anyhow in a corner, the dogs are doing their doggy stuff"?

NEW: No, it's...

I don't think it's a period.

BROOKS: Yeah, there's no period there.

NEW: It's not a period.

BROOKS: So I want to put a period there, "That the dreadful martyrdom does not run its course, anyhow."

And that the "anyhow" doesn't refer back to the "martyrdom" as if it's a certain casual dismissal of the martyrdom.

To juxtapose "dreadful martyrdom" in the middle of a line with the simple four words, "must run its course," Oh, how dreadful, dreadful.

- Little... maybe back to the tone of... maybe back to that...

Exactly, it's the tone-- you can decide how dreadful you're going to make... - Oh, how dreadful, right.

- Yeah, and then "some untidy spot."

Interesting adjective, untidy.

Can't we clean this up?

Can't we make this more like a miraculous birth?

Mm-hmm, and Auden just so brilliantly knows how to introduce that and make it uncomfortable for the reader.

BROOKS: "Where the dogs go on with their doggy life."

POWER: "And the torturer's horse scratches its innocent behind."

BROOKS: "And the torturer's horse scratches its innocent behind on a tree."

SACKS: I think there is something almost ludicrous going on.

♪ ♪ There's a kind of ruthless way in which Auden knows, and it may be discomforting, but he's really going to put it there and make it work.

NEW: And he's appealing to our cruelty, our childish cruelty.

Yes, but there's also a kind of anger, and a kind of remorse about having to say that.

So he's so complicated morally.

We've all seen executions on TV, or if we haven't seen them in life, in wartime.

And if you look at them, they're pretty tawdry.

They're just, like, a couple guys kneeling by a ditch on the side of the road, and somebody shoots them in the back of the head.

And I saw one on TV recently, and the guy's shirt billowed with the force of the bullet, just like a wind passed over his shirt.

And it's not heroic at all-- it's just a little ditch.

NEW: How are we to find some moral perspective on this ditch?

Looking at its squalor with fascination is indecent.

Decent men and women do look away in ordinary times.

Life goes on.

But what about those times when we cannot look away, when suffering is pervasive and inevitable, when the ditch is what is true?

Can the painter help us gain perspective then?

Can the poet?

SACKS: His thinking about these matters was intense at this time.

He had read Mein Kampf, he had been aware of what was going on in Europe in 1938.

Belgium-- of course, Brussels had been a city of tremendous suffering in the First World War.

Auden had seen aerial warfare, boys falling out of the sky.

(explosion) He said the poet should not be propagandist, reformer.

He says, if you want to, okay, but it's not the task of the poet.

The task of the poet is to maintain the accuracy of language.

And that's where he links it to politics, because he says as soon as language becomes inaccurate, we have violence.

(speaking German) (crowd cheering) (chanting "Sieg Heil") ♪ ♪ This is a poem that maintains a casual sound.

It doesn't, in an initial reading, seem formally crafted.

One doesn't... one might not even notice the rhymes.

And yet, there they are-- Wrong-along, waiting-skating.

SACKS: All the way through.

Forgot-spot, tree-be.

It's a kind of craft which is going to be persisting throughout the poem, saying that, "I can put this into an arrangement."

Yes, there's a... "I'm a shaper."

Yes, and that's the auditory equivalent of the visual composition.

I should say why I like Auden more than most poets-- because he... A, he has narrative.

There's story, and some of us only think really narratively.

And B, he has argument.

NEW: This actually reads like an argument, right?

Like, first we're talking about suffering, I'm invoking suffering, so you know exactly what I mean, and then, "in Brueghel's Icarus, for instance."

♪ ♪ SACKS: "In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance."

BROOKS: "How everything turns away quite leisurely from the disaster."

POWER: "The ploughman may have heard the splash, "the forsaken cry, but for him, it was not an important failure."

The sun shone... SACKS: "...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..." BROOKS: "A boy falling out of the sky."

POWER: "Had somewhere to get to."

SACKS: "And sailed calmly on."

NEW: So what do we see in this painting?

These are the images that strike me the most, you know-- the looking away at whatever is on his mind, him just going about his business.

NEW: The ploughman.

POWER: Yeah, the ploughman, the infamous ploughman.

The ploughman, such a central figure.

"May"-- interesting word.

POWER: He may have heard the splash, he may have heard the forsaken cry.

BROOKS: "The ploughman may have heard the splash, the forsaken cry."

NEW: "Forsaken cry" turns the emotional...

Turns it up, yes.

"Forsaken cry."

SACKS: Yes, yes.

It's actually the most operatic word, "forsaken."

SACKS: It's an interesting word, forsaken.

Because we've had martyrdom, we've had the nativity, and Christ.

- Christ.

He says, "Why hast thou forsaken me?"

POWER: Auden notes the ploughman, who may have heard the splash, may have heard the forsaken cry, but for him it was not an important failure.

Now, what should he have done?

Should he have dropped the plough, run to get help?

What's... - He's actually pretty... - He's so engaged in the ploughing.

NEW: He's pretty close, though.

SACKS: So he's close, and yet, there's another level of activity between him and the ship, and just... Brueghel's eye is so fabulously intrigued, and I think this is part of Auden's interest as well, is just the technique of the artist and what distance that creates from a scene of suffering in the pleats of the soil as it's being ploughed in relation to the pleats of the tunic that the ploughman's wearing, that vivid red that's right in the center of the painting, as if that's what's important is the arm of the ploughman, not the legs of the boy.

As a painter, there's an almost democratic distribution of attention to all the details-- the chains on the link that binds the plough to the horse.

The colors, the chromaticism of the sky as it reflects itself on the surface of the water.

BROOKS: "The sun shone, as it had to, on the white legs disappearing into the green water."

POWER: "The white legs disappearing into the green water."

It has an emotional, or a vivid punch, actually, in terms of the suffering, again, with great economy.

SACKS: I mean, who cares what color the legs in the water were if this poor person is falling out of the sky and drowning?

But the painter cares.

- Yeah, the painter cares.

- And the poet cares to mention what the painter cared about.

POWER: "And the expensive, delicate ship "that must have seen something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky."

BROOKS: And then "the delicate ship."

The key word there is "delicate."

Ships are not always delicate.

They can be delicate, I guess, with the rigging.

And it's almost... there's sort of an aristocratic element.

- Oh, it's an expensive, delicate ship.

- Yeah, yeah.

There's something disparaging about the expensive ship, about its delicacy.

So it's both admiring, and yet... ...is this the most important human achievement?

I bring that up because I think the ship is going to stand in for yet another craft, and the craft of the poem has got its eye on the craft that is sailing on-- it's the final agent of the poem.

POWER: The ship that sails calmly on, which is a very nice way to put it.

And that's what people do-- they go calmly about their business.

The second it gets at the normal indifference we all have, and the paradox, which is we're aware of suffering, we sympathize with the suffering, but we can't sympathize with every act of suffering.

Because there's seven billion people in the world-- that's a lot of suffering.

It would sort of encumber our lives.

And so...

I've covered events like the decline of the Soviet Union, some riots, some killings in Africa, people dying of AIDS in Africa, and you're in the hospitals and they're all dying.

And you want this to stop.

Well, a lot of what you're trying to do, if you witness something that you've seen directly, you're trying to bring the reality to make the people far away feel what you felt when you were right there.

And there are all those people back home going to the Mets game.

And you want them to feel this, and you want them to act, and you want to elicit outrage.

And so you write in a way that will personalize it, that will elicit their outrage, and you're hoping it'll pay off.

And most of the time it doesn't, but some of the time it does.

POWER: I give you the example of Ebola and the U.N. Basically, everybody's impulse was "Let me keep my people away from that problem," even though, cognitively, they knew that the problem was just going to spread and would inevitably come to their country if we didn't deal with it.

But then, instead of relying on U.N. bureaucrats to brief the problem, where we actually beamed a Liberian health worker who spoke to a room in which you could've heard a pin drop about what it was like to turn away a father who was carrying his daughter.

For a health worker to say that, versus the W.H.O.

saying, "The statistical assessment is the following..." I mean, it was transformative.

There are scenes one could depict of heroic acts, like my Liberian health worker, who, himself, is likely to get Ebola by working in this clinic.

And so you choose what you depict and whose actions you put in the foreground.

Yet there's a truth here that we can live, blithe, hugging our small reality as large tragedies play themselves out elsewhere.

And so I think the poem is holding us morally accountable, and it's showing us what is largely the case.

It's a summons.

♪ ♪ NEW: Is this poem holding us morally responsible, or is it just revealing the facts?

SACKS: I think its greatness is that it's doing both.

It's admitting that this is the way things are, this is the way humans are.

They're capable not only of overt cruelty but of turning away.

He understands that we're guilty, and we have to somehow live with that as well.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪