Musee des Beaux Arts
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.
Musee des Beaux Arts
Sulla sofferenza non si sbagliavano mai,
I vecchi Maestri: come hanno capito bene la
sua posizione umana: come avviene
mentre qualcun altro sta mangiando o aprendo una finestra o semplicemente camminando insensibilmente;
Come, quando gli anziani aspettano con riverenza, appassionatamente
la nascita miracolosa, devono esserci sempre
bambini che non volevano particolarmente che accadesse, pattinando
su uno stagno ai margini del bosco:
non hanno mai dimenticato
che anche il terribile martirio deve correre il suo corso
Comunque in un angolo, un posto disordinato
dove i cani continuano la loro vita da cani e il cavallo del torturatore si
gratta la schiena innocente su un albero.
In Icarus di Breughel, per esempio: come tutto si allontana
abbastanza tranquillamente dal disastro; il contadino potrebbe
aver sentito il tonfo, il grido abbandonato,
ma per lui non fu un fallimento importante; il sole splendeva
come doveva sulle gambe bianche che scomparivano
nell'Acqua verde , e la nave delicata e costosa che doveva aver visto
Qualcosa di straordinario, un ragazzo che cadeva dal cielo,
aveva un posto dove andare e navigava con calma.
TEXTUAL ANALYSIS – Musee des Beaux Arts
“Musee des Beaux Arts” is a poem written by W. H. Auden.
Just considering the title, the intelligent reader finds some curiosity that pushes him/her to make a sense to the speaker’s point of view. Moreover he/she makes conjectures about the poem’s content.
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. The structure of the short poem is relatively simple.
Simply giving a glance to the layout you can easily realise it is a free verse poem which is separated into two parts, or stanzas. The reading experience allows the reader to discover that each stanza performs a different function and has have different meanings, that the reader must find if he/she wants to understand the poem. The first stanza establishes the theme of the poem (that old painters understood the nature of human suffering) and the second stanza provides a specific example, which Auden describes and analyses in more detail. Although the first three lines of "Musee des Beaux Arts" appear to have the same meter, the poem is largely unstructured and chaotic: there is no rhyme scheme and the lines, as well as the stanzas, vary in length from one another. As for the figures of the speech the poem contains no examples of metaphor or personification, but there is an enjambment ("Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse).
Reading the first verse, the speaker observes the painting as he writes. He is completely absorbed in what he sees. He writes in the third person and none of his thoughts are references to himself. Auden is particularly struck by Breughel’s Icarus. The painting captures the moment when, having flown too close to the sun on wings held together by wax, Icarus plunges into the sea. We might think that this disaster would be the focal point of the painting, but it clearly isn’t.
The major theme, or general message, of this poem is about the nature of human suffering. Auden recognises that all humans have painful and traumatic experiences that can change the course of their lives, but meanwhile the rest of the world continues on in a mundane way.
