By Dr Oliver Tearle

W. H. Auden wrote 'Musée des Beaux Arts' in December 1938, while he was staying in Brussels with his friend Christopher Isherwood. The museum and fine art gallery mentioned in the verse form's championship, 'Musée des Beaux Arts', is the Brussels art gallery, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, which Auden visited. 'Musée des Beaux Arts' alludes to a number of paintings by erstwhile Dutch painters – the 'Quondam Masters' – which hang in the Belgian gallery. You tin can read 'Musée des Beaux Arts' here earlier proceeding to our assay below.

The easiest style to approach Auden'southward poem is to break it upwards into two stanzas, the start of which establishes the theme of the verse form (that onetime painters understood the nature of human suffering) and the 2nd of which provides a specific example, which Auden describes and analyses in more than detail.

In summary, Auden observes that the 'Erstwhile Masters' – painters working in Europe during the Renaissance and Early on Modern catamenia – understood the nature of suffering and its 'man position': namely, that, no affair the intensity or momentousness of the experience to the person undergoing it, there were people in the surrounding vicinity who were indifferent to, or even ignorant of, what was taking place.

During the birth or birth of Christ, there were children 'who did non specially want it to happen', who went on skating on a nearby pond (well, co-ordinate to tradition, information technology was December, afterwards all); while some 'dreadful martyrdom' was taking place, some future saint was being tortured in a wood, the equus caballus belonging to the torturer stood idly past and scratched its 'innocent behind' on a tree. (Note how the adverb 'passionately', used of the people eagerly awaiting the nativity of Christ, contains a subtle suggestion of the suffering or martyrdom to come, namely the 'Passion' of the Crucifixion.)

In the second stanza, Auden moves to a specific case: considering Pieter Brueghel the Elderberry'south Mural with the Fall of Icarus(pictured correct), which depicts the tiny 'white legs' of the youth (who flew as well close to the sun) as they disappear, nearly insignificantly, into the water, Auden argues that such a painting bears out his statement about the Onetime Masters understanding the 'human being position' of suffering.

Every bit Icarus plunges to his death in the sea, the ploughman overlooking the bay pays the sight no mind, while the nearby ship carries on (having 'somewhere to get to'). Icarus' demise, so celebrated as a mythical apotheosis of hubris and human being tragedy, goes unobserved.

Information technology's worth analysing the individual details Auden mentions, many of which tin can be plant in specific paintings by Brueghel or past other artists of the period. In the showtime stanza, the onlookers and bystanders given the most attention are the children and the dogs and horses. Children and animals are often oblivious to human suffering considering they do not understand it, and so we sympathise why they may be ignorant of the 'dreadful' or 'miraculous' events occurring within earshot (or eyeshot).

But in the second stanza, we movement away from this world of innocence: nosotros leave, if yous will, the 'innocent behind' (sorry, in that location had to be a pun to be got out of that phrase, and at least we didn't hitting rock lesser).

Instead, in the second stanza, Auden brings in the adult world while focusing on the fall of Icarus. Indeed, we might go farther than this: the tables are turned. Icarus is the child here, 'a boy falling out of the heaven', whereas the people inhabiting the environment are no longer children or animals but adults: a ploughman, an 'expensive delicate ship' (full of merchants or even of import personages) that, we must assume, is full of people, sentient adult people, who 'must take seen' what has taken place.

The i not-human observer mentioned in this second stanza (if we read the send metonymically as a reference to the people on lath) is the sun, and the lord's day, information technology's worth recalling, was the very thing that caused Icarus' fall: later he flew besides close to it, the heat of the sun melted the wax holding his wings together, and he vicious into the Aegean.

What is the meaning of this subtle shift? It signals a move from ignorance to indifference, simply the motility is gradual. The 'ploughman may' have heard Icarus falling into the ocean, but he may have been entirely ignorant of what was taking place. Just the people on the ship 'must take seen' what happened. We knew the children and animals were not to arraign for their innocence in the first stanza. Nosotros cannot say the same about the ship'due south crew.

We at present know what Auden could not: that the painting he discusses in 'Musée des Beaux Arts', Mural with the Fall of Icarus, virtually certainly isn't by Brueghel at all. Recent detective work reveals that it was probably a copy of a lost original, and was painted by some other (unknown) artist. Whoever painted it, information technology all the same chimes with Auden'southward argument near the 'Old Masters'. For Philip Larkin, suffering may have been verbal; but those who are nearby when it happens take their own lives to lead.

About Westward. H. Auden

Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-73) was born in York, England, and was educated at the Academy of Oxford. He described how the poetic outlook when he was born was 'Tennysonian' but by the time he went to Oxford as a pupil in 1925, T. S. Eliot's The Waste matter Land had altered the English language poetic landscape abroad from Tennyson and towards what nosotros now call 'modernism'.

Surprisingly given his later, ameliorate-known work, Auden's early on poetry flirted with the obscurity of modernism: in 1932 his long work The Orators (a mixture of poesy and prose poesy with an incomprehensible plot) was published past Faber and Faber, and so under the watchful eye of none other than T. S. Eliot. Auden afterwards distanced himself from this experimental fake starting time, describing The Orators as the kind of work produced by someone who would later either become a fascist or go mad.

Auden thankfully did neither, embracing instead a more traditional set of poetic forms (he wrote a whole sequence of sonnets about the Sino-Japanese War of the late 1930s) and a more directly way of writing that rejected modernism's love of obscure allusion. This does not mean that Auden'south work is always straightforward in its meaning, and arguably his most famous poem, 'Funeral Blues', is often 'misread' as sincere elegy when information technology was intended to be a send-upward or parody of public obituaries.

In early 1939, not long before the outbreak of the Second World War, Auden left Britain for the United States, much to the annoyance of his fellow left-wing writers who saw such a movement as a desertion of Auden's political duty as the most prominent English poet of the decade. In America, where he lived for much of the rest of his life with his long-time partner Chester Kallman, Auden collaborated with composers on a range of musicals and continued to write poetry, just 90% of his best work belongs to the 1930s, the decade with which is near associated. He died in 1973 in Austria, where he had a holiday domicile.

If you lot'd get agree of all of Auden'southward major poetry, nosotros recommend the wonderful Collected Auden . To larn more near his work, see our discussion of ane of his finest brusk political poems, our thoughts on his 'Funeral Blues', and our analysis of his powerful poem about refugees living in New York.

The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English language at Loughborough University. He is the writer of, among others, The Secret Library: A Volume-Lovers' Journeying Through Curiosities of History and The Keen War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem.