Musee des Beaux Arts

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.

Considering the title, the intelligent reader is curious to find out why it is written in French. After searching the translation, the intelligent reader expects the poem to be about a beautiful museum.

Considering the layout is easily to see that the poem doesn’t follow a specific pattern. The poem is made of 21 lines and it’s divided in two different parts. The first is made of 13 lines, and the second one of 8 lines. The stanzas have a varying in line length and rhythm. For example, the fourth line is the longest one and the twelfth the shortest one. So the intelligent reader is curious to find out why the poet decided to brake the rhythm with these two verses.

In the first stanza the speaker makes observations from other paintings by the same artist, Brueghel, namely Numbering at Bethlehem, Winter Landscape with Skaters and a Bird Trap and Massacre of the Innocents.

These references highlight the strange, contrasting human experiences that are part of the fabric of life - one person suffers terribly, another carries on regardless with some mundane activity.

The philosophical question that surfaces from such an issue - Why is it that some can knowingly ignore the cries for help from those experiencing torture and pain? - is partly answered in the poem. For example, in the first stanza there are children who did not want a miraculous birth to happen, despite an older generation passionately waiting for a miracle birth. They continue skating on ice, oblivious to the one-off happening.

The speaker states with a cool detachment how there always must be such a gap between the young and the old.

We shouldn't forget that the paintings the speaker is studying are equivalent to today's T.V. reportage. How many times have we watched horrific and disturbing images from some remote place in the world, knowing that, not too far away, normal lives are being lived.

The second stanza reinforces the idea of separateness, of people at work, at play, whilst the disaster, the suffering, goes on elsewhere. Is it apathy that takes over? Are people consciously looking the other way to avoid involvement?

Auden's poem, through the eyes of an observer of old paintings, explores the idea that, as humans, we knowingly carry on with our familiar and mundane duties as long as we can, even if we know someone may be suffering.

 Line length plays an important role in this poem. Long clauses, with cleverly placed punctuation, help measure the steady conversational tone of the speaker.

Note that there is only one period (full stop) in the whole body of the poem, at the end of the first stanza. Commas, colons and semi-colons play a crucial role in the syntax by allowing the sense to build up, as in an argument or debate. Enjambment also lets the flow continue from one line into the next.