The allure of Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Artes” mystifies initially. I’ve appended it but you probably know it, for it’s included in most anthologies of best English poems. Its casual diction makes it sound hardly like a poem at all, more like the offhand observation of a bored art historian.

We sense he’s bored because his speech is sloppy. His first sentence, by exaggerating, asserts something patently untrue. “About suffering they were never wrong” – never? Not one of this group? And then he remembers to mention what group he’s talking about, “the Old Masters” (a vague denominator). In a crisp lecture, you’d never put your subject in apposition, “oh, by the way” – or generalize about such an amorphous collective.

The sloppiness continues. Further generalizations – “always,” “never,” “everything,” obviously overstate. Expressions like “run its course,” “anyhow,” “for instance,” and “quite”, common enough in conversation, feel foreign to the intensified precision of verse. From that shockingly unpoetic line, “the dogs go on with their doggy life”, we recoil: who is this sniffy, bored know-it-all!

Unpredictable line lengths likewise strike us as sloppy. In English poetry, we expect meters to repeat; this speaker can’t be bothered. And even though all but one of these twenty-one lines rhymes (see if you can find the exception), the rhymes feel inadvertent, happenstance -- again, sloppy.

Why would a poet want to make himself unappealing? Is Auden tone-deaf?

Hardly. The bored narrative voice signals the poem’s theme, which is the community’s indifference to individual suffering. We’re too busy being to ache for others. I’m appalled by the starvation in Gaza, the ruin in Ukraine, the Texas flood victims, but am I weeping? Today’s concerns concentrate on my family, nation, dog-pal Henry’s allergies, a biopsy (I’m sure it’s nothing but still…). I pay more attention to my widening waist than to that Gazan kid’s flagrant ribcage. I feel bad about not feeling worse but hey, we’ve got to harden ourselves, don’t we, to get through our day?

Chillingly our poet shrugs off his callousness. That’s just how things are. The greatest events in history may be occurring – the miraculous birth, the crucifixion – and heigh-ho, we’re checking our watch. Sure, it’s odd, that boy falling out of the sky into the sea, but we’ve got places to go and things to do, not a moment to pause.

Published in 1938, Auden’s poem spookily anticipates the world’s sluggish response to the Holocaust and atomic bomb: they were terrible, yeh, but what could we do? We shudder at our own inability to feel adequately or even want to. Busy doing – right now, typing these words – I am not grieving.

And it was always thus. The Old Masters were “never wrong about suffering,” because they were human, like us, so to survive had to limit their anguish. To compound the irony, Breughel, instead of suffering, made a beautiful painting, and Auden a beautiful poem. We take pleasure in contemplating calamities not our own.

The bored art historian haunts because I am he. I caterwaul about one thing one day, another the next, and what do I achieve? A reputation for caterwauling? Maybe a shapely phrase? Consciousness is not conscientious. Even the best of us mean to be better than we are. But how good can I afford to be? “Human kind,” as T.S. Eliot put it, “cannot bear very much reality.”

The challenge for consciousness in this unconscionable age is to do the best we can – and forgive our failure, which is inevitable. I must ignore Icarus and Christmas and the Crucifixion so I’ve time to tidy these futile words.

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Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedAbout suffering they were never wrong,The Old Masters: how well they understoodIts human position; how it takes placeWhile someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waitingFor the miraculous birth, there always must beChildren who did not specially want it to happen, skatingOn a pond at the edge of the wood:They never forgotThat even the dreadful martyrdom must run its courseAnyhow in a corner, some untidy spotWhere the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horseScratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns awayQuite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman mayHave heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shoneAs it had to on the white legs disappearing into the greenWater; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seenSomething amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

The circle gathers here each morning. These are three of the conversations you didn’t see.