Musee des Beaux Arts (1939)

We've all done it before: as we walk down a busy street, we are looking at our phones, distracted, not paying attention to the world around us. 'Musee des Beaux Arts,' published in 1939 by W.H. Auden, is a poem about that same idea—except there are no smartphones. Instead, the poem depicts themes of people turning away from—or simply not noticing—the lives and suffering of those around them.

‘Musee des Beaux Arts’ Poem Background Information

W.H. Auden wrote ‘Musee des Beaux Arts’ after visiting the Royal Museums of Fine Arts (French translation: Musee des Beaux Arts) in Brussels, Belgium. The poem focuses on one painting in particular: Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (c. 1555 by Pieter Breughel), which captures the scene of the Greek myth the Fall of Icarus, as told by Ovid in his epic poem Metamorphoses (8 A.D.).

Fig. 1 - Drawing of Daedalus and his son Icarus.

The Fall of Icarus

In Greek mythology, Daedalus and his son Icarus attempt to escape captivity by using wings secured by wax. Daedalus warned his son that he must not fly too close to the sun. If he does, his wings will melt. Icarus ignored his father’s advice, however. He flew too close to the sun, his wings melted, and he drowned in the sea below.

‘Musee des Beaux Arts’ Poem Summary

The poem opens with an arresting statement by the speaker: “About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters” (lines 1-2). Given the title’s context, the speaker is referencing the European painters whose works are featured in the art museum he is visiting. This line abruptly states the subject of the poem: suffering.

As the speaker walks through the museum, he looks at various paintings. The first two alluded to in the first stanza are, as scholars presume, Census at Bethlehem (1566) and Massacre of Innocence (1565), both painted by Breughel (though they are not named in the poem). The speaker remarks about the place human suffering has in society. Depicted in the paintings before him, suffering is treated as commonplace. Amidst the mundane, suffering “takes place while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along” (lines 3-5).

Fig. 2 - Landscape With the Fall of Icarus painting by Pieter de Oude.

The second and final stanza focuses on Breughel’s painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. The speaker describes what he sees in the painting: the plowman, the sun shining, the white legs in the green water, the delicate ship. Yet what the speaker notices is how “everything turns away quite leisurely from the disaster” (lines 16 - 17).

The disaster here is Icarus’s drowning, and the "human position" (line 3) is with its back to it. The plowman simply presses on because to him the fall and drowning aren’t that important. The delicate ship, the speaker says, “must have seen something amazing,” (lines 21-22) but instead of noticing it, “sails calmly on” (line 23).

‘Musee des Beaux Arts’ Full Poem

‘Musee des Beaux Arts’ Poem Analysis: Structure and Literary Devices

Let us take a look at the structure and literary device of this poem.

Structure of ‘Musee des Beaux Arts’

Ekphrasis

‘Musee des Beaux Arts’ was inspired by the painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus and also features it in its text. Writing about the painting allows Auden to bring the reader into the landscape and see how the people react (or don’t react) to the disaster happening around them.

Even if we didn’t have the painting to look at, readers could identify how the plowman and the ship carry on, as if nothing terrible is happening. The sun, which “shone as it had to on the white legs,” is depicted as indifferent to the young boy. It’s simply doing its job, nothing more.

Free Verse and Line Breaks

Upon first reading it, ‘Musee des Beaux Arts’ employs free verse, which is a lack of regular rhyme scheme or metered lines of poetry. However, when reading it more closely, you’ll find subtle rhyming at the end of some lines. For example, “wrong” (line 1) and “along” (line 5); “understood” (line 2) and “wood” (line 9), and so on. Auden masks the rhyming with the use of enjambment.

For example, Auden relies on enjambment for the waving of long and short lines when describing suffering in the first stanza:

The enjambment also depicts the seamlessness between profound suffering and mundane things, as the words flow from one line to the next. Line 11 begins:

Literary Devices in ‘Musee des Beaux Arts’

Juxtaposition

Auden uses juxtaposition — placing two contrasting ideas side by side — for thematic effect. For example, the speaker implicitly references the painting Census at Bethlehem (Breughel, 1566), which depicts the birth of Jesus Christ reimagined as a contemporary event in a Flemish village. In the scene, there are “children…skating on a pond at the edge of the wood” (lines 8 - 9). Juxtaposing the children in Census at Bethlehem as unaware of what is to come mirrors the plowman in Landscape with the Fall of Icarus who is blissfully unaware of the drowning Icarus. Putting these two scenes side by side emphasizes how disconnected they both are from each other.

Syntax

The opening line is startling primarily because of its syntax: “About suffering they were wrong, The Old Masters.” If written in typical English language word order, the sentence would read: “The Old Masters were never wrong about suffering.” It’s the same sentence, but written this way takes away its punch.

Auden flips it, putting the subject (The Old Masters) at the end of the sentence to force the phrase "about suffering" to the beginning. The speaker shines a spotlight on suffering, which is exactly what doesn’t happen in any of the paintings the speaker sees. Right off the bat, we know this is a poem about suffering.

Diction

The speaker’s word choice highlights the nonchalance toward disaster and suffering. The speaker remarks, “That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course/Anyhow in a corner…where the dogs go on with their doggy life” (lines 12 - 13). “Dreadful martyrdom” are heavy words, loaded with darkness and suffering. Yet in a corner, dogs are just doing their business—and Auden chooses causal, conversational words like “doggy life” to suggest the complete opposite of “dreadful martyrdom.”

‘Musee des Beaux Arts’ Themes and Meaning

Let us take a look at the themes in this poem and their meaning.

Indifference to Suffering

Earlier we discussed how ‘Musee de Beaux Arts’ is a poem about suffering. But what does the poem say about suffering? That’s where we get to the poem’s theme, or the statement the poem makes about its subject.

Every detail in the poem culminates in the final image, which reads:

A boy has not only fallen out of the sky, but is now drowning. The expensive ship had “somewhere to get to” and didn’t notice the tragedy happening off to the side. This arresting image highlights the indifference that many have toward the suffering of others. Often, we may be too distracted or too busy to notice what’s going on, and we may miss something truly terrible.

Suffering is in the Eye of the Beholder

On the other hand, perhaps the poem is saying something else about suffering. ‘Musee de Beaux Arts’ may also suggest that suffering isn’t universal; instead, it may be something that is defined by a person. For example, in the final stanza (and in the painting), the plowman pushes his cart along, as if nothing out of the ordinary has happened.

Lines 18-19 read that he may “Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, but for him it was not an important failure.” The moral of the Greek myth of Icarus focuses on his error of flying too close to the sun, which leads to his death. The plowman, though, doesn’t see it that way—or at all. To him, Icarus's failure is nothing significant.