Audens Musãƒâ©e Des Beaux Arts Uses Icarus Drowning as an Example of Which Element of Human Nature
Andrew has a keen interest in all aspects of verse and writes extensively on the field of study. His poems are published online and in print.
W.H.Auden
Westward.H.Auden And A Summary of Musee des Beaux Arts
Musee des Beaux Arts is a verse form that focuses on human suffering, tragedy and pain past contrasting the lives of those who endure and those who practise not. The vehicle by which this is accomplished is the world of painting, in particular the work of the old masters.
Auden is philosophical and conversational, combining close observation with nonchalant musings.
Written in 1938, simply before the start of WW2, it signalled an important change in Auden'south way of life and expression. He left backside his political persona and began to develop one that was more than spiritual in nature. At the same time he emigrated to the USA, abandoning England and Europe.
Much of his poesy relates to the state of the human centre, history, social trends and world affairs. He embraced both traditional and modern forms of verse; Musee des Beaux Arts (Museum of Fine Arts) incorporates elements of both.
Musee des Beaux Arts
Well-nigh suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes identify
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully forth;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there ever must be
Children who did not specially want information technology to happen, skating
On a pond at the border of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs keep with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns abroad
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken weep,
Just for him it was not an of import failure; the lord's day shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the greenish
H2o, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a male child falling out of the heaven,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
Icarus
The Fall of Icarus is a painting past Flemish artist Pieter Brueghel (1525-69) and depicts Icarus, the son of Daedalus, falling out of the sky and into the sea after flight too close to the Sun with his home-made wax and feather wings.
Further Analysis of Musee des Beaux Arts
Musee des Beaux Arts is an informal commentary on the bizarre homo situations that ascend in certain older paintings, notably one, The Fall of Icarus, which is now in the Musees Royaux des Beaux Arts in Brussels.
Auden creates a speaker who is, to all intents and purposes, delivering an opinion on various paintings that deal with man suffering. The speaker seems knowledgable and gradually comes to a serial of mini conclusions regarding the plight of those who suffer and those who don't.
Those who don't are frequently bystanders, ordinary members of the public going about their daily business organization oblivious to what's going on behind closed doors or just out of earshot. And if they do notice something unusual, they're also busy or distracted to do anything about it.
In the starting time stanza the speaker makes observations from other paintings by the same artist, Brueghel, namely Numbering at Bethlehem, Wintertime Mural with Skaters and a Bird Trap and Massacre of the Innocents.
These references highlight the strange, contrasting human experiences that are part of the fabric of life - one person suffers terribly, another carries on regardless with some mundane activity.
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The philosophical question that surfaces from such an issue - Why is it that some can knowingly ignore the cries for assistance from those experiencing torture and hurting? - is partly answered in the poem.
Musee des Beaux Arts - Shut Analysis
For instance, in the kickoff stanza there are children who did not want a miraculous birth to happen, despite an older generation passionately waiting for a miracle nativity. They continue skating on ice, oblivious to the one-off happening.
The speaker states with a cool disengagement how there ever must exist such a gap between the young and the sometime.
And a niggling further on the philosophical, fateful speaker asserts in a quiet fashion how martyrdom must run its course, no matter how dreadful, in some backwater, away from the hubbub of the crowd.
Nosotros shouldn't forget that the paintings the speaker is studying are equivalent to today'south T.V. reportage. How many times have we watched horrific and disturbing images from some remote identify in the world, knowing that, not also far away, normal lives are being lived.
The second stanza reinforces the idea of separateness, of people at work, at play, whilst the disaster, the suffering, goes on elsewhere. Is it aloofness that takes over? Are people consciously looking the other way to avoid involvement?
There is an irony in this and the speaker captures it in a subtle, affair of fact way. Equally Icarus dramatically falls into the sea the outcome for 1 human being was non an important failure; it made no impression on a passing ship with somewhere to get to; there is no reaction.
Auden's poem, through the eyes of an observer of quondam paintings, explores the thought that, as humans, we knowingly conduct on with our familiar and mundane duties as long as we can, even if we know someone may be suffering.
We need routine, nosotros fear lark. Nosotros don't like being shocked out of our petty lives too often. Suffering will always happen and in that location's not much the average person tin can exercise well-nigh information technology.
Analysis of Musee Des Beaux Arts
A poem of 21 lines in full, split into two stanzas with varying line length and rhythm. Note the apply of terminate rhymes throughout the poem, for example:
Line 1/Line 4 - wrong/forth
Line two/Line eight - understood/woods
Line 5/Line 7 - waiting/skating
Line six/Line thirteen - be/tree
Line 9/Line eleven- forgot/spot
Line ten/Line 12- course/equus caballus
Lines xiv-21 also are end rhymed.
This rhyming is varied and has no established design and so the rhyme becomes near incidental, an repeat of what it should be in a tighter rhyme scheme. All of this suggests tradition with a twist, a loosening and stretching of reality.
Line length plays an important role in this poem. Long clauses, with cleverly placed punctuation, help measure the steady conversational tone of the speaker.
Note that there is simply one period (full cease) in the whole trunk of the poem, at the stop of the outset stanza. Commas, colons and semi-colons play a crucial office in the syntax past allowing the sense to build up, as in an argument or debate. Enjambment also lets the flow continue from one line into the next.
Sources
Norton Anthology, Norton, 2005
www.poetryfoundation.org
100 essential Mod Poems, Ivan Dee, Joseph Parisi, 2005
© 2016 Andrew Spacey
Source: https://owlcation.com/humanities/Analysis-of-Poem-Musee-des-Beaux-Arts-by-WHAuden