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About suffering they were never wrong,The old Masters: how well they understoodIts human position: how it takes placeWhile someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waitingFor the miraculous birth, there always must beChildren who did not specially want it to happen, skatingOn a pond at the edge of the wood:That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its courseAnyhow in a corner, some untidy spotWhere the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horseScratches its innocent behind on a tree. • In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns awayQuite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman mayHave heard the splash, the forsaken cry,But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shoneAs it had to on the white legs disappearing into the greenWater, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seenSomething amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
Analysis • It's almost as if Auden is toying with us at the start of this poem. See, the first couple of lines all have ten syllables in them.
Background • Is a poem by W. H. Auden from 1938. The poem's title derives from the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique in Brussels which contains the painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, thought until recently to be by Pieter Brueghel the Elder,though still believed to be based on a lost original of his.
Summary • It turns out that when bad things happen to people, other people are usually looking the other way. At least, that's what our speaker starts to think as he looks at Pieter Brueghel's
Analyzing the prom • About suffering they were never wrong,The Old Masters: how well they understoodIts human position; how it takes placeWhile someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waitingFor the miraculous birth, there always must beChildren who did not specially want it to happen, skatingOn a pond at the edge of the wood:They never forgotThat even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spotWhere the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horseScratches its innocent behind on a tree.In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns awayQuite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman mayHave heard the splash, the forsaken cry,But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shoneAs it had to on the white legs disappearing into the greenWater; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seenSomething amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
The theme is • Anytime that a poem announce that it's about suffering, chances are…it's about suffering. But Auden makes sure that we know just how embedded suffering is in the other activities that occupy our daily lives. Sure, we read about it on the web – but do we know when it's happening to our next-door neighbors? Painting society with a wide brush allows Auden to draw back and emphasize the ways that pain is everywhere.
Tellhowthe post • So why is Auden such hot stuff? Well, for one thing, he's a jack-of-all-trades. The man turned out poems of all shapes, sizes, and styles – and they were pretty much all readable. "Musée des Beaux Arts" is an especially great example of his work, though, which is why we're sharing it with you today. For one thing, it's about as simple as a poem can get. Except it's also complex. And emotionally nuanced. Oh, and free-spirited. And politically hard-hitting. In other words, it covers a lot of ground.
