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.