By Dr Oliver Tearle

Westward. H. Auden wrote 'Musée des Beaux Arts' in December 1938, while he was staying in Brussels with his friend Christopher Isherwood. The museum and fine art gallery mentioned in the poem's championship, 'Musée des Beaux Arts', is the Brussels fine art gallery, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, which Auden visited. 'Musée des Beaux Arts' alludes to a number of paintings by old Dutch painters – the 'Old Masters' – which hang in the Belgian gallery. Y'all tin read 'Musée des Beaux Arts' hither before proceeding to our analysis below.

The easiest style to approach Auden'southward poem is to intermission it upward into 2 stanzas, the showtime of which establishes the theme of the poem (that old painters understood the nature of human suffering) and the second of which provides a specific example, which Auden describes and analyses in more detail.

In summary, Auden observes that the 'Quondam Masters' – painters working in Europe during the Renaissance and Early on Mod menstruation – understood the nature of suffering and its 'man position': namely, that, no matter the intensity or momentousness of the experience to the person undergoing information technology, there were people in the surrounding vicinity who were indifferent to, or fifty-fifty ignorant of, what was taking place.

During the nativity or nascency of Christ, there were children 'who did not specially want it to happen', who went on skating on a nearby pond (well, according to tradition, it was December, after all); while some 'dreadful martyrdom' was taking identify, some time to come saint was being tortured in a wood, the horse belonging to the torturer stood idly by and scratched its 'innocent behind' on a tree. (Annotation how the adverb 'passionately', used of the people eagerly awaiting the birth of Christ, contains a subtle suggestion of the suffering or martyrdom to come, namely the 'Passion' of the Crucifixion.)

In the second stanza, Auden moves to a specific example: because Pieter Brueghel the Elder'south Mural with the Fall of Icarus(pictured right), which depicts the tiny 'white legs' of the youth (who flew besides shut to the sun) as they disappear, almost insignificantly, into the water, Auden argues that such a painting bears out his statement about the Former Masters understanding the 'human position' of suffering.

As Icarus plunges to his death in the sea, the ploughman overlooking the bay pays the sight no listen, while the nearby ship carries on (having 'somewhere to get to'). Icarus' demise, so historic equally a mythical apotheosis of hubris and human tragedy, goes unobserved.

It's worth analysing the individual details Auden mentions, many of which tin be found in specific paintings past Brueghel or by other artists of the period. In the first stanza, the onlookers and bystanders given the near attention are the children and the dogs and horses. Children and animals are often oblivious to human suffering considering they do not empathize it, and so we sympathise why they may exist ignorant of the 'dreadful' or 'miraculous' events occurring within earshot (or eyeshot).

Simply in the 2nd stanza, we motility abroad from this world of innocence: we get out, if you lot will, the 'innocent backside' (sorry, there had to be a pun to be got out of that phrase, and at least we didn't hitting rock lesser).

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 hither, 'a male child falling out of the heaven', whereas the people inhabiting the surroundings are no longer children or animals but adults: a ploughman, an 'expensive delicate send' (full of merchants or even important personages) that, we must assume, is full of people, sentient developed people, who 'must have seen' what has taken place.

The one not-human observer mentioned in this 2d stanza (if we read the transport metonymically equally a reference to the people on board) is the sun, and the sun, information technology's worth recalling, was the very thing that acquired Icarus' autumn: after he flew too close to information technology, the heat of the sunday melted the wax holding his wings together, and he barbarous into the Aegean.

What is the meaning of this subtle shift? It signals a move from ignorance to indifference, but the move is gradual. The 'ploughman may' have heard Icarus falling into the sea, simply he may have been entirely ignorant of what was taking identify. But the people on the ship 'must accept seen' what happened. We knew the children and animals were not to blame for their innocence in the first stanza. We cannot say the same about the send's crew.

We now know what Auden could non: that the painting he discusses in 'Musée des Beaux Arts', Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, well-nigh certainly isn't past Brueghel at all. Contempo detective work reveals that it was probably a copy of a lost original, and was painted by some other (unknown) artist. Whoever painted information technology, it all the same chimes with Auden'due south statement about the 'One-time Masters'. For Philip Larkin, suffering may have been verbal; but those who are nearby when it happens have their own lives to pb.

Well-nigh 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 every bit a pupil in 1925, T. South. Eliot's The Waste Land had altered the English language poetic landscape away from Tennyson and towards what we now phone call 'modernism'.

Surprisingly given his later, meliorate-known piece of work, Auden's early poetry flirted with the obscurity of modernism: in 1932 his long work The Orators (a mixture of poetry and prose poesy with an incomprehensible plot) was published by Faber and Faber, and so under the watchful heart of none other than T. S. Eliot. Auden after distanced himself from this experimental simulated beginning, describing The Orators every bit the kind of work produced past someone who would later 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 War of the late 1930s) and a more straight way of writing that rejected modernism's love of obscure allusion. This does non mean that Auden'due south work is e'er straightforward in its significant, and arguably his near famous poem, 'Funeral Blues', is ofttimes 'misread' as sincere elegy when it was intended to exist a send-up or parody of public obituaries.

In early on 1939, not long before the outbreak of the 2d World War, Auden left Britain for the United states, much to the annoyance of his beau left-fly writers who saw such a motility as a desertion of Auden'due south political duty as the most prominent English poet of the decade. In America, where he lived for much of the rest of his life with his long-time partner Chester Kallman, Auden collaborated with composers on a range of musicals and continued to write poetry, but 90% of his best piece of work belongs to the 1930s, the decade with which is well-nigh associated. He died in 1973 in Republic of austria, where he had a holiday home.

If you'd get hold of all of Auden's major verse, we recommend the wonderful Collected Auden . To larn more most his work, see our give-and-take of one of his finest short political poems, our thoughts on his 'Funeral Blues', and our analysis of his powerful verse form nearly refugees living in New York.

The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English language at Loughborough University. He is the author of, amongst others, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers' Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem.