Musee des Beaux Arts
" Musee des Beaux Arts " by W. H. Auden is one of the most interesting poems written in the 20th century. The poem builds up an imaginary scenery belonging to a modern place , a museum. The poem is divided into four stanzas, each one of them constitutes a vivid visual picture that readers can imagine or even draw on a paper. I think the best way to understand this poem is by imagining or drawing the pictures it provides in each stanza. The ruling or unifying idea of all the pictures is Man's suffering in this life.
PICTURE NO. ONE
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;
The poet is now at a museum for
" fine arts" where famous painters ( he calls them ' The Old Masters'
) exhibit their famous paintings for the public. In the first stanza , Auden is
in front of a painting in which somebody is suffering alone. These painters,
Auden says, understand very well the bitterness of suffering especially when a
person suffers alone. To make us feel the bitterness of this experience of
suffering alone, the painter draws also some other people who are not suffering
at all. They simply are either eating, looking through a window or just walking
aimlessly without caring for the person who suffers alone in the same painting
of life. The poet chooses these two contradictory sides of life to pinpoint the
theme of suffering.
PICTURE NO. TWO
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:
In this stanza, W. H. Auden is
standing before another painting where there is a group of old( aged) people
who are just waiting for a "miraculous birth" ; they are waiting for
the change of life; they even wish this harsh modern life to end. However this
is impossible and it seems like miraculous or will never happen. In the whole human
history, we have heard of only one miraculous birth which is the birth of Jesus
Christ who was born of no father. The poet wants to say that you surely suffer
a lot when you just wait. Waiting is itself
suffering and this waiting must be so much harder when you wait for
something which will never happen at all. In the other side of this painting
there is another group but of children who are very happy playing "
skating on a pond" . These children, unlike the old men in this same
painting, are happy with their life and they do not want it to change or end .
Again in this painting we have somebody suffering while someone else does not
feel or care for that suffering.
PICTURE NO. THREE
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.
"They never forgot", the
poet means the Old Masters or painters in this museum. Even martyrdom contains
suffering. As you all know people die for God, religion, a life principle etc
and such people are hailed and considered martyrs. Yet at the moment of their
martyrdom the martyrs must have suffered a lot. In this painting, there is a
man who is being executed by a hangman in a very dirty place. In this same
painting there is the hangman's horse which is unaware of the suffering of that
person. But why should we blame the horse for not caring about the suffering of
the martyr? In fact, neither the poet nor the painter wants us to blame the
animal but they want us to disdain and
denounce the merciless act of the executioner himself not his horse. The
executioner is just a human being in shape but he is like an animal( horse) in
feeling. In this picture, the poet also puts two contradictory images of someone
who suffers alone ( the martyr) and the other who does not care at all ( the
executioner).
PICTURE NO. FOUR
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.
Breughel ( Pieter Breughel, the Elder, a Flemish painter of the 16th
century) has a painting entitled " Landscape
with the Fall of Icarus". You
should all know who Icarus is, the young boy who plans to escape his prison by
making wings out of feather and wax. You should also remember that story about
him in Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus!!. In Breughel's painting,
there is a boy falling out of somewhere in the sky. His white legs are just
disappearing into the sea. At that same moment of falling, there is a farmer
who continues farming without paying any attention to the cry of that falling
boy. There is also a ship which is sailing calmly as if there was nothing
strange around like the big splash water produces when something falls form a high place into the sea! This is perhaps
the strangest picture in this poem; the witness of the boy's suffering, Icarus,
is not one person but so many ( the ship and its crew and the people in it
too.) . The ship is " expensive and delicate" which means it may have
been a tourist ship full of passengers who must have noticed that great fall of
a boy. Above all, the sun goes on shining, which means that even Nature itself
does not care for that poor lonely boy falling alone into the sea.
As such, all these paintings and all the interpretations of the paintings
by the poet himself tell us pointblank that the one who suffers in modern
Western life will suffer alone without anybody caring.
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