Musée des Beaux Arts1
[W. H. Auden (1938, 1940)]
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 dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting 5
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:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course 10
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.
In Brueghel's Icarus,2 for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the plowman may 15
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, 20
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
1. "Museum of Fine Arts." The reference is to the Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels, which contains Brueghel's Icarus.
2. Icarus was the son of Daedalus, the cunning craftsman of ancient legend. Together they flew on artificial wings fastened to their shoulders with wax, hut Icarus ventured too near the sun, which melted the wax, and so he fell and perished. The painting of the fall of Icarus is by the Flemish painter Pieter Brueghel (ca 1520-69) Icarus’ legs are disappearing into the sea in one corner of the picture, which has nothing to do with him. In A Treasury of Modern Art Thomas Craven comments "it is the greatest conception of indifference in painting--an indifference which seems to flood the landscape reducing the whole notion of classical mythology to a couple of lower extremities
(extracted from Norton Anthology of English Literature II)
3JANE’S LITERARY APPRECIATION
W. H. AUDEN – musÉe de beaux arts
The open [G] line gives us an idea of what the poem could speak about. [B: line outlines / suggests the main topic of the poem] We expect the poem to talk about “suffering” and moreover [moreover is "inoltre", here it is used inappropriately] the speaker introduces, in the second line, the characters that would speak about it: “The Old Masters”. Then we have been [G] explained [B: we are told] “how” this “suffering”, according to the speaker, has been represented by “The Old Masters”. New characters enter the poem, characters that are presented in their daily life: first there is an anonymous “someone”, then we have “the aged” and “children” that [G] create an opposition, but this opposition is annulled when, in the [omit “the”] line 9, we find “they”. The sentence we have is like a breaking sentence, which breaks the flowing images we had before: the pronoun joins all the characters and explains in what consists this “suffering” they show and “never forgot”. [I don’t think that is true: “they” refers solely to the Old Masters] Words as “martyrdom” and “torturer” connote what “suffering” is, but here another opposition is created between the images of daily life we had before and the images we have from these words. [Yes]
So [Thus,] in this first part of the poem we understand that the speaker is talking about pictures and what these pictures make him think of; we don’t know which pictures [these] are, we only know what they generally represent and who are their characters [the characters in them]. But in the second part of the poem the speaker refers to a specific picture, which he takes as [as an] example for [of] what he has said before.
This picture is “Icarus” by Brueghel. And again we find “how”, that is this picture, taken as example, explain [G] what is the speaker’s idea of “suffering”. But now we are represented by words what the picture represents exactly [clumsy phrase]: we find the ploughman, the image of Icarus disappearing into the water, the ship that “sailed calmly on”. [in the previous stanzas we did have references, though not as detailed, to the pictures]. We have the picture without seeing it. This is what is called Ekphrasis, that is “the poetic description of a work of art” as L. Spitzer defined it. [I don’t know this Spitzer. Perhaps, you can further explain in class]
The mood of this second part follows that of the last part of the previous stanza: it is calm, but sad and connote [G] a scene that is dramatic and amazing, a scene that has got in itself [omit “in itself,” you can write “a scene that combines…” life (the ploughman who works in the fields; the sun shines) and death (Icarus drowning; the legs described as “white” which is the color of death), in which the feeling that comes out is indifference [B: . The general mood is one of indifference…] in contrast with the images we had in the first stanza (the old men waiting for a birth, the children that are the symbol of life, hope for future [However, the children too were indifferent]). But the same Icarus [But Icarus himself combines] joins in himself the opposites: the adjective “white” referred to his legs connotes death, but also it is the symbol of pureness [purity], it is the color of the angels (Icarus is, in some way, a fallen angel) and he is called “a boy”, so the speaker reminds [“so” and “reminds” are not used in this way. You could say. “thus, the speaker reminds us of…”. B: boy”, a reference to the children of the first stanza, symbol of life and of [the] future.
Dear Angela, I’m quite pleased with this work, because you have gone beyond the summary of the plot and provided an analysis of the style and rhetoric of the poem. In general your comments are convincing, though sometimes more precision is needed. The misunderstanding of the “they” pronoun is a problem because it affects the general interpretation. Also, I don’t think there is an opposition between the two stanzas in terms of positive / negative, hope / indifference, since indifference is found in the previous stanza too. Rather, the II stanza is a more detailed exemplification of the theme outlined in the first (as explicitly indicated by the phrase “In Brueghel's Icarus,2 for instance:”).
In general, there are many good points in your literary appreciation and the English is also quite good.
In your future work I would like you to weigh your statements more carefully. Poems, at least good poems, and especially 20th century poems, usually avoid taking a univocal, didactic or sentimental stance, and strive for complexity, nuances, and sometimes irony, even when they adopt a relatively simple style of address as in the above poem by Auden. For example, your observation on white and angels is cogent. You then add that Icarus is a “fallen angel”. Again, this too makes sense. However, you fail to notice the obvious tension between the two statements. “Fallen angels” are not pure. They are the devil, Lucifer and his followers specifically. A similar point holds for your association of Icarus and the children. The children are “pure”? Perhaps. However, in the first stanza they are a symbol of indifference to the great event. Does this mean they are "bad", they symbolize ignorant, coarse people? I don't think so, however the tension needs to be explored. Perhaps the event is NOT so important for some people, and it is all a question of perspectives (same point for the peasant). In other words, the literary appreciation should consider all these tensions and arrive at a more complex statement that would explain them and their relationship.