How does Auden tell the story in Musee des Beaux Arts?

Hello,

Breughel - Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

As promised, I've written a model response to an odd-numbered question (AO2) on Auden's Musee des Beaux Arts. Here it is:

How does Auden tell the story in Musee des Beaux Arts?

Unlike most other Auden poems, Musee des Beaux Arts doesn’t start with concrete images, characters or settings, but instead begins in abstraction. A short and seemingly simple poem, it crams in a lot of ideas and concerns found throughout his poetry. The voice in the poem is distant and philosophical, employing a complex initial sentence which lasts for fifteen lines. The first clause in this complex sentence is structured by Auden in a way which places immediate emphasis on the subject of the poem: ‘About suffering’. This unusually abstract and direct opening tells us immediately what the subject of the poem will be, while the subject of the sentence (‘The Old Masters’) is shunted into line two. This has the effect of making the setting (the Musee) a secondary concern; it is merely a way in which the abstract will be made concrete later in the poem.
 

In terms of the verse form, the first three lines lull us into a familiar pattern of regularity. There are ten beats per line; the underlying rhythm is that of iambic pentameter. This establishes a lofty tone to match the philosophical nature of the opening. However, this regularity unravels in line four, which drags on for twenty-two syllables. This shift in the verse form coincides with a shift in the language and focus of the poem. Line four is made up of simple, everyday language – Auden’s ‘light verse’ – as attention shifts from the ‘Old Masters’ to the mundane, everyday details revealed in the paintings: ‘opening a window’ or ‘walking dully along’. Here, the structure of the poem is mimetic; the movement from order to chaos in the verse form mimics the ‘untidy’ nature of life which is the subject of the line and the poem.

The rest of the first stanza is made up of contrasts, and one particular effect created by Auden is bathos (dear reader, remember that bathos is an abrupt transition in style from the exalted to the commonplace, the high to the low, producing a ludicrous effect). This contrast is seen in the descriptions of the ‘aged’ as ‘reverently, passionately waiting for the miraculous birth’ to the children ‘skating’. The religious connotations of the descriptions of the aged contrast sharply with the innocent, carefree actions of the children. More obviously bathetic is the contrast between the ‘dreadful martyrdom’ which is taking place in the painting and the ‘doggy life’ of the dogs and the ‘torturer’s horse’ which ‘scratches its innocent behind on a tree.’ These contrasts establish key ideas in the poem: the significant and the mundane, innocence and experience. Auden is pointing out that even at significant historical moments, most people are oblivious, innocently going about their normal business and indifferent to the suffering of others.

Auden’s choice of settings in the poem are significant. The Musee establishes the philosophical tone of the opening and fits the contemplative nature of the poem. The frozen, busy landscapes of Breughel’s paintings are almost the opposite: teeming with life and activity. Familiar images from Auden are present. The frozen landscape is suggestive of winter and death, which matches the idea of ‘martyrdom’ (another religious reference to the Massacre of the Innocents) and ‘suffering’. The ‘edge of the wood’ could be seen as threatening to the skating children. In 1st September 1939, a ‘haunted wood’ is used as a symbol of fear, and the idea of being lost is associated with experience and adulthood. The wood could be used as an image to suggest the threat to the children’s innocence.

The first stanza ends with a mundane and humorous detail: a horse scratching its ‘behind on a tree’. By this point, Auden’s movement from the lofty to the lowly is complete; all types of experience are included to encompass a universal message.

The second stanza of the poem is ekphrastic (reader, ekphrasis is a type of poem which describes a scene in a painting). Whereas the first part of the poem takes its inspiration from various works by Breughel, here we focus on one: Icarus. This gives the impression that the poem has been a contemplative journey past a number of paintings before settling to focus on one in particular. At this point, rhyme becomes a prominent feature of the poem, suggesting a sudden order, clarity and certainty to the speaker’s thoughts. It is as if this painting has helped Auden to neatlt pin down his phiosophical ideas. Although there are two couplets in this stanza, the other rhymes are split, suggesting that the poet’s conclusions are still ‘untidy’; life is chaotic and complex. The use of enjambment adds to this effect. For instance, the words ‘green/Water’ are split, making the reader’s eyes fall to the next line quickly like Icarus plunging into the water.

There are further contrasts in this stanza. Icarus’s downfall is described by negative words like ‘disaster’, ‘forsaken’ and ‘failure’. Meanwhile, for the ploughman and for us (until we see the legs in the water) this painting is idyllic. The words ‘leisurely’ and ‘delicate’ create an image of peace, and lyrical aspects such as the sibilance of ‘sun shone’ and the use of colour help create a vivid picture of beauty. Auden uses these contrasts to show that success and failure, life and death, significant and insignificant, beauty and horror, live alongside each other and happen simultaneously. Again, the second stanza is made up of one long, complex, flowing sentence which shows that these frozen moments are artifice and that, unlike in paintings, real life never stops for tragedy. This point is emphasised by the sense of movement in the final words: the ship ‘sailed calmly on’. So, in this poem, Auden defies convention by taking us from abstract to concrete, using a painting to explore contrasting subjective viewpoints on suffering.

I hope this is useful. If this poem comes up in the exam, I'd jump at the chance if I were you!

Good luck!

Finally, here are the other paintings which inspired the poem:

Breughel - The Massacre of the Innocents

Breughel - Winter Scene with a Birdtrap

Breughel - The Census at Bethlehem

Mr M