Past Dr Oliver Tearle

Due west. H. Auden wrote 'Musée des Beaux Arts' in December 1938, while he was staying in Brussels with his friend Christopher Isherwood. The museum and art gallery mentioned in the poem'southward title, '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 past old Dutch painters – the 'Sometime Masters' – which hang in the Belgian gallery. You can read 'Musée des Beaux Arts' here earlier proceeding to our analysis beneath.

The easiest way to arroyo Auden'southward poem is to interruption it up into two stanzas, the first of which establishes the theme of the poem (that old painters understood the nature of man suffering) and the second of which provides a specific case, which Auden describes and analyses in more than detail.

In summary, Auden observes that the 'Old Masters' – painters working in Europe during the Renaissance and Early Modern flow – understood the nature of suffering and its 'human position': namely, that, no matter the intensity or momentousness of the feel to the person undergoing it, in that location were people in the surrounding vicinity who were indifferent to, or even ignorant of, what was taking identify.

During the nativity or birth of Christ, at that place were children 'who did not specially want it to happen', who went on skating on a nearby pond (well, according to tradition, it was December, after all); while some 'dreadful martyrdom' was taking place, some futurity saint was existence tortured in a woods, the horse belonging to the torturer stood idly by and scratched its 'innocent behind' on a tree. (Note how the adverb 'passionately', used of the people eagerly awaiting the birth 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 example: considering Pieter Brueghel the Elder's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus(pictured right), which depicts the tiny 'white legs' of the youth (who flew as well close to the sun) equally they disappear, almost insignificantly, into the h2o, Auden argues that such a painting bears out his statement near the Old Masters understanding the 'human position' of suffering.

As Icarus plunges to his expiry in the ocean, the ploughman overlooking the bay pays the sight no listen, while the nearby ship carries on (having 'somewhere to get to'). Icarus' demise, so celebrated as a mythical apotheosis of hubris and homo tragedy, goes unobserved.

It's worth analysing the private details Auden mentions, many of which can exist plant in specific paintings by Brueghel or past other artists of the period. In the first stanza, the onlookers and bystanders given the most attention are the children and the dogs and horses. Children and animals are frequently oblivious to man suffering because they do not empathize information technology, and then nosotros understand why they may exist ignorant of the 'dreadful' or 'miraculous' events occurring within earshot (or eyeshot).

But in the second stanza, we move away from this world of innocence: we go out, if yous will, the 'innocent behind' (sorry, there had to exist a pun to be got out of that phrase, and at to the lowest degree we didn't striking stone lesser).

Instead, in the 2nd stanza, Auden brings in the adult world while focusing on the fall of Icarus. Indeed, nosotros might go further than this: the tables are turned. Icarus is the child here, 'a male child falling out of the sky', whereas the people inhabiting the surroundings are no longer children or animals but adults: a ploughman, an 'expensive frail ship' (total of merchants or fifty-fifty important personages) that, nosotros must assume, is full of people, sentient adult people, who 'must accept seen' what has taken place.

The i not-human observer mentioned in this 2nd stanza (if we read the send metonymically as a reference to the people on board) is the dominicus, and the sun, it's worth recalling, was the very thing that acquired Icarus' autumn: subsequently he flew too close to it, the heat of the sun melted the wax property his wings together, and he cruel into the Aegean.

What is the pregnant of this subtle shift? Information technology signals a move from ignorance to indifference, but the move is gradual. The 'ploughman may' have heard Icarus falling into the bounding main, but he may take been entirely ignorant of what was taking place. Merely the people on the ship 'must take seen' what happened. Nosotros knew the children and animals were not to blame for their innocence in the first stanza. We cannot say the same nigh the ship's crew.

We now know what Auden could non: that the painting he discusses in 'Musée des Beaux Arts', Mural with the Fall of Icarus, well-nigh certainly isn't by Brueghel at all. Recent detective work reveals that information technology was probably a copy of a lost original, and was painted past another (unknown) artist. Whoever painted it, it notwithstanding chimes with Auden's statement about the 'Old Masters'. For Philip Larkin, suffering may have been exact; only those who are nearby when information technology happens accept their own lives to lead.

Virtually W. H. Auden

Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-73) was born in York, England, and was educated at the University of Oxford. He described how the poetic outlook when he was born was 'Tennysonian' just past the time he went to Oxford as a student in 1925, T. S. Eliot's The Waste Country had altered the English poetic landscape away from Tennyson and towards what we now call 'modernism'.

Surprisingly given his later on, better-known work, Auden's early on poetry flirted with the obscurity of modernism: in 1932 his long work The Orators (a mixture of verse and prose poetry with an incomprehensible plot) was published by Faber and Faber, then under the watchful eye of none other than T. S. Eliot. Auden later distanced himself from this experimental imitation showtime, 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 than traditional set of poetic forms (he wrote a whole sequence of sonnets most the Sino-Japanese War of the tardily 1930s) and a more straight style of writing that rejected modernism's love of obscure allusion. This does non mean that Auden's work is always straightforward in its meaning, and arguably his well-nigh famous poem, 'Funeral Blues', is often 'misread' every bit sincere elegy when it was intended to be a ship-up or parody of public obituaries.

In early 1939, non long earlier the outbreak of the 2nd World War, Auden left Uk for the Us, much to the annoyance of his fellow left-fly writers who saw such a move as a desertion of Auden's political duty equally the virtually 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 verse, but 90% of his best work belongs to the 1930s, the decade with which is well-nigh associated. He died in 1973 in Austria, where he had a holiday dwelling house.

If yous'd become agree of all of Auden's major poesy, we recommend the wonderful Nerveless Auden . To learn more about his piece of work, run into our discussion of 1 of his finest short political poems, our thoughts on his 'Funeral Blues', and our analysis of his powerful poem about refugees living in New York.

The writer of this commodity, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. He is the author of, among others, The Cloak-and-dagger Library: A Volume-Lovers' Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great War, The Waste State and the Modernist Long Poem.