Featured Poem:

Musee des Beaux Arts
by W.H. Auden

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 Breughel'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.



If there is one poem that conveys the message of W.H. Auden’s passion for oppressed people absolutely clearly and without any distortion, it is probably Musée des Beaux Arts. Unlike a Spain 1937, or even a September 1, 1939, with their lengthy facility with words, Musée succeeds simply in its succinctness. The poem’s brevity, its ability to come to its point in just a few short allusions leave the reader with a searing indictment of what Auden sees as man’s indifference to the suffering of his fellow man. From the opening line there is little chance the reader should be confused about where Auden is leading. He does not, to use a cliched term, “beat around the bush.”

Auden initially sets the poem from the point of few of the gods, most likely those of Ancient Greece and Rome. This is evidenced in the quotes, “about suffering they [italics mine] were never wrong,” and, “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.” The “Old Masters” implies gods of old. There is hardly a tale involving classic gods that does not tell of acts of foolishness on the part of mortals in comparison to the gods’ all-knowing judgement. Auden does not expect that human beings should have the maturity to recognize their fellows’ suffering and raise a hand in assistance. He leaves expectations of understanding to the gods. Gods understood suffering, its “human position,”—i.e., the randomness of its occurrence.

To give an example of randomness of suffering, Auden presents a situation with the potential for bringing about suffering: children skating on a frozen pond, where they might fall through the ice. Swiftness and lack of warning are signs of great tragedy in literature. The best and most frightening stories begin with scenes of innocence only to be suddenly interrupted by tragedy. For tragedy to strike a character in the act of recreation is to catch the reader off guard. The image of children at play over a frozen pond works to this effect. The use of children as victims taps into the readers’ emotional vein.

Auden’s strategy is to induce the reader into identifying with the ignorant humans he addresses. Their fault and the reader’s fault are one and the same. He means to play to the readers’ guilt for having allowed the tragedy to occur. He reminds the readers of how their comfortable bourgeois lives will go on long after their fellow man is befallen by tragedy. Hence, “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.” The reference to the simple routines of animals and their bodily functions is meant to represent people’s trivial pursuits in their everyday existence. Like the dog living its “doggy life” and the horse scratching its behind on a tree, human beings live off the fat of the land without contribution.

The strong point of the poem that is the most inspired of Auden is his use of the Brueghel painting The Fall of Icarus. Icarus is in essence, the visual counterpart to Musée’s subjective association. As Auden describes it, the painting depicts the people’s inaction as Icarus is plummeting down to earth. The world is apathetic to Icarus’s plight. Auden is wise to draw the connection to Brueghel’s painting. It is as if both Auden and Brueghel are illustrating the same message. Indeed, the poem is a tribute to Brueghel, as it is revealed in the footnotes that Icarus is located in the museum of the poem’s title, the Musée des Beaux Arts.

It is the irony of this poem that Auden is trying to reach his readers with an appeal to their emotions and their sense of guilt and compassion in order to preach the point to them that he believes they have no sense of compassion. He is essentially counting on their lack of apathy in order to get their attention and tell them they are apathetic. This is not a flaw in the poem; rather it can be viewed positively. The poem becomes a call for reforming the human character.