The value of poetry in supplying consolation in bereavement was stressed in an interview in the Sunday Times this week by Lord Saatchi. The one-time advertising guru told Bryan Appleyard that verse was helping him through the grief from which he still suffered 17 months after the death of his wife Josephine Hart from ovarian cancer.

He cited as a useful poem W.H. Auden’s Musée des Beaux Arts, which captures the loneliness of grief for an individual while the rest of the world goes about its business. The poem is concerned with Pieter Brueghel’s painting The Fall of Icarus. Auden describes how “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”.

It happens that this is a favourite poem of mine by a writer whose work I have admired since my early schooldays. What a thrill it was for me, having come to work in Oxford in 1973, to have occasional glimpses of the great man about the town (chiefly in St Aldates) during the last months of his life when he occupied a cottage in the grounds of Christ Church.

Not all Grays were as keen. Simon Gray cheesed me off slightly when he gave a drubbing to Auden in The Smoking Diaries, a very entertaining book published eight years ago. He particularly savaged Musée des Beaux Arts. He wrote that he had often raised its deficiencies with his friend Ian Hamilton, the poet and critic whose death from cancer, prefiguring Gray’s own, haunts these diaries.

The poem’s first words set him off: “About suffering they were never wrong, the Old Masters.”

“[H]ow can you be right or wrong about suffering?” he asks. “And as for ‘the Old Masters’ — well, the old masters, whoever they were, were young or anyway alive when they painted their paintings, they weren’t being old masters, or masters of anything except the palette to hand, the canvas in front of them — so I would nag away at Ian, hey, what about the horse at the end, scratching its ‘innocent’ behind against a tree, what would a ‘guilty’ behind be like?

“Well, let’s not go into that, especially when discussing Auden, keep focused on the horse, ‘indifferent’ to Icarus falling out of the sky — but it wouldn’t be indifferent, this horse, because it wouldn’t have seen — if you’ve ever looked at the Brueghel he claims to be writing about you can see the horse not seeing — and not seeing is not at all the same thing as being indifferent.”

Turning to the poem that brought Auden to a vast new audience at the end of the 20th century, when it was recited by Simon Callow in Four Weddings and a Funeral, Gray pays Stop All the Clocks the tribute of saying it is better on the page. “The poem is written as a blues number, it’s got real jump and beat to it, the film poem rolls out like a sermon, reverential and syrupy.”

Nothing syrupy could be seen in Auden’s celebration, in verse and life, of the urban landscape. I was reminded of this last week while reading the local historian Liz Woolley’s excellent little book Oxford’s Working Past (Huxley Scientific Press), which I bought from her in the Rose and Crown pub during North Parade’s farmers’ market two weeks ago. Liz reminds readers that Auden, an admirer of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, had been in the habit of guiding friends to the St Ebbe’s gasworks during his student days because he thought it “the most beautiful place on earth”.

In the light of the looming crisis over the nation’s ash trees, I have lately thought often of Auden’s marvellous poem on English woodland, his Bucolics, II: Woods. It ends: “The trees encountered on a country stroll/Reveal a lot about a country’s soul./A small grove massacred to the last ash,/An oak with heart-rot, give away the show:/This great society is going smash;/They cannot fool us with how fast they go,/How much they cost each other and the gods./A culture is no better than its woods.” Wonderful stuff!