In Audens Musãƒâ©e Des Beaux Arts What Did the Old Masters Understand About Human Nature?
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 art gallery mentioned in the poem's 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 'One-time Masters' – which hang in the Belgian gallery. You tin can read 'Musée des Beaux Arts' here before proceeding to our analysis beneath.
The easiest fashion to approach Auden'due south verse form is to pause it upwardly into ii stanzas, the outset of which establishes the theme of the verse form (that former painters understood the nature of human suffering) and the 2d of which provides a specific example, which Auden describes and analyses in more detail.
In summary, Auden observes that the 'Old Masters' – painters working in Europe during the Renaissance and Early Mod menses – understood the nature of suffering and its 'homo position': namely, that, no thing the intensity or momentousness of the feel to the person undergoing it, at that place were people in the surrounding vicinity who were indifferent to, or even ignorant of, what was taking place.
During the nativity or birth of Christ, in that location were children 'who did non specially want it to happen', who went on skating on a nearby swimming (well, co-ordinate to tradition, it was December, after all); while some 'dreadful martyrdom' was taking place, some future saint was existence tortured in a woods, the equus caballus 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 proposition 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 Mural with the Fall of Icarus(pictured right), which depicts the tiny 'white legs' of the youth (who flew too close to the lord's day) as they disappear, almost insignificantly, into the h2o, Auden argues that such a painting bears out his statement nigh the Old Masters understanding the 'human position' of suffering.
As Icarus plunges to his death in the ocean, the ploughman overlooking the bay pays the sight no heed, while the nearby send carries on (having 'somewhere to get to'). Icarus' demise, then historic as a mythical embodiment of hubris and homo tragedy, goes unobserved.
It's worth analysing the individual details Auden mentions, many of which can be found in specific paintings by Brueghel or by other artists of the period. In the first stanza, the onlookers and bystanders given the nearly attention are the children and the dogs and horses. Children and animals are often oblivious to human suffering because they do non understand it, and then we sympathize why they may be ignorant of the 'dreadful' or 'miraculous' events occurring within earshot (or eyeshot).
But in the 2nd stanza, we move away from this world of innocence: nosotros exit, if you will, the 'innocent backside' (pitiful, there had to exist a pun to be got out of that phrase, and at least we didn't hit rock bottom).
Instead, in the second stanza, Auden brings in the adult world while focusing on the fall of Icarus. Indeed, we might get 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 environs are no longer children or animals but adults: a ploughman, an 'expensive delicate ship' (full of merchants or even important personages) that, we must assume, is full of people, sentient adult people, who 'must have seen' what has taken identify.
The one non-human observer mentioned in this second stanza (if we read the ship metonymically as a reference to the people on lath) is the sunday, and the sun, it's worth recalling, was the very thing that caused Icarus' autumn: later he flew too close to it, the rut of the sun melted the wax holding his wings together, and he fell into the Aegean.
What is the meaning 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 sea, but he may have been entirely ignorant of what was taking place. But the people on the transport 'must have seen' what happened. We knew the children and animals were not to blame for their innocence in the offset stanza. We cannot say the same about the ship's coiffure.
Nosotros now know what Auden could not: that the painting he discusses in 'Musée des Beaux Arts', Landscape with the Autumn of Icarus, almost certainly isn't by Brueghel at all. Contempo detective work reveals that information technology was probably a re-create of a lost original, and was painted past some other (unknown) artist. Whoever painted it, it however chimes with Auden's argument about the 'Old Masters'. For Philip Larkin, suffering may have been exact; but those who are nearby when it happens have their own lives to lead.
Virtually Due west. 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' but by the fourth dimension he went to Oxford as a student in 1925, T. S. Eliot's The Waste Country had altered the English language poetic landscape away from Tennyson and towards what we now call 'modernism'.
Surprisingly given his later on, ameliorate-known piece of work, Auden'south early poetry flirted with the obscurity of modernism: in 1932 his long work The Orators (a mixture of poetry and prose poetry with an incomprehensible plot) was published by Faber and Faber, then nether the watchful eye of none other than T. Southward. Eliot. Auden later distanced himself from this experimental false showtime, describing The Orators as the kind of work produced by someone who would afterwards either become a fascist or go mad.
Auden thankfully did neither, embracing instead a more traditional set up of poetic forms (he wrote a whole sequence of sonnets about the Sino-Japanese State of war of the late 1930s) and a more direct way of writing that rejected modernism's honey of obscure allusion. This does non hateful that Auden's work is always straightforward in its pregnant, and arguably his most famous verse form, 'Funeral Dejection', is often 'misread' as sincere elegy when it was intended to be a send-upward or parody of public obituaries.
In early on 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 move every bit a desertion of Auden'southward political duty as the nigh prominent English poet of the decade. In America, where he lived for much of the rest of his life with his long-fourth dimension partner Chester Kallman, Auden collaborated with composers on a range of musicals and connected to write poetry, but 90% of his best piece of work belongs to the 1930s, the decade with which is most associated. He died in 1973 in Austria, where he had a vacation abode.
If you lot'd get hold of all of Auden'south major poetry, we recommend the wonderful Collected Auden . To learn more virtually his piece of work, run into our word of one of his finest short political poems, our thoughts on his 'Funeral Blues', and our analysis of his powerful poem nigh refugees living in New York.
The writer of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. He is the writer of, among others, The Surreptitious Library: A Book-Lovers' Journey Through Curiosities of History 
Source: https://interestingliterature.com/2017/12/a-short-analysis-of-w-h-audens-musee-des-beaux-arts/
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