Telling, though …

… Misreading Auden | City Journal. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Gabbert herself does not seem to be paying attention to the poem or the poet she is writing about. She declares that a horse is not scratching itself on a tree in another painting by Bruegel that Auden alludes to: The Massacre of the Innocents. But at the lower right-hand corner of that painting, a horse is doing just that. “Most of his poems,” Gabbert proclaims about Auden, “also have a clear rhyme scheme.” No, they don’t. “‘Shone’ in the British pronunciation rhymes with ‘on,’” she reports. No, it doesn’t