So, you might be wondering to yourself, "how am I going to understand this poem
when it's not even in English?" Well, let's figure that out together. This is W.H.
Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts." About suffering they were never wrong, The old Masters: how
will they understood Its human position: how it takes place while someone else is
eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; How, when the aged
are reverently, passionately, waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must
be Children who did not specifically 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 Anyhow in a corner, someone tidy spot
Where dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturers horse Scratches its
innocent behind on a tree. In Bruegel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns
away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash,
the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the Sun shone As it
had 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, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on. So this poem is quite
confusing: it's broken up into two stanzas and it can really be hard to
grasp - either one. Both of them start off pretty,
almost mysterious if you don't know what you're looking for. But one rule of
poetry is to try and read the poem a couple of times, and that rule will help
you out a lot with the first stanza. So, let's take a look at those first three
lines together again: "About suffering they were never wrong, The old Masters:
how well they understood Its human position." So what I did here with the
colors is just try to show you that the antecedents - "suffering" for "its" and
"the old masters" for "they" - are kind of separated from their pronouns, and that's
what makes what would otherwise be a pretty understandable sentence a little
difficult. If you were to rewrite this in prose instead of verse you would
rewrite it as, "The old masters were never wrong about suffering. They
understood its human position." So we're using basically all the same words, but
we've put it in an order that makes more sense. So why is Auden writing in this
sort of backwards order here? Well there's a number of reasons a poet
might take this approach. They might want to play with the syllables: where they
land, for their meter, or they might want to create a rhyme scheme by ending on a
certain word. But, I think the biggest thing Auden is doing here is
putting suffering up front and center. It's the second word of the poem. If we
wrote it the other way, it would be at the very end of that first sentence. So
now it's at the beginning of that sentence. So if you followed this rule
you'll hopefully understand that suffering is the subject of our first
stanza and with that in mind it becomes much more difficult -
sorry, much easier, to figure out. You might wonder who the old masters are
still, and we'll get to that in the second stanza, so the rest of the stanza
here uses a poetic technique known as juxtaposition. And juxtaposition is just
where you take two things and you hold them up to make a point;
create a comparison. So, what I did here is I tried to color-code what's being
juxtaposed. The first one is how "it" takes place - the "it" refers back to suffering. So
suffering takes place while someone else is eating or opening a window or just
walking dully along. So in this pairing we see that while
some people are suffering, other people are doing mundane tasks like eating or
opening a window or walking along in a boring fashion. So while some people
suffer, other people have normal boring days. The next pairing is the "aged" who are
"reverently, passionately waiting for the miraculous birth." And this is just simply
saying that people are excited about a child being born. Adults are sitting
around and they're counting down the days till the birth of a child. Elsewhere
though, there are "Children who did not specifically want it to happen, skating/On a pond at the edge of the wood." This is a pretty difficult two lines to
figure out, but if you think of the image Auden is
creating, children skating on a pond at the edge of a wood, and you know that the
stanza is about suffering, then you can probably imagine what he's
getting at. If you know it's going to be a sad movie, and you see children skating
on a pond, you're pretty sure they're gonna go under, right?
So his pairing here is, in the first part, people waiting for this miraculous birth
to take place and, in the other part, people who lose their children too early:
perhaps the worst thing in the entire world. In our final pairing we see
"dreadful martyrdom," which is dying for a belief, "run its course...in a corner:
somewhere "dogs go on with their doggy life" and the horses scratch their butts
on a tree. So dying for your belief versus horses scratching their butts -
can't get much more opposite than that. But the point of this stanza becomes
clear by the end of it: that while some people suffer, other people
just go about their business or live happy lives. And we kind of trade places
where we are in life, but you don't know when the suffering is coming, all the
time and sometimes you're having really good days and sometimes you're having
really bad days and sometimes when you're having a good one, the person next
to you might be having a very bad one. And that's what he's gonna dive in more
to in the second stanza. So in "Bruegel's Icarus" - we should pause right here
because another rule of poetry is understanding every word of the poem and
for most readers, they're not going to know at least one if not two of those
three words in that stanza already. So Bruegel, if we look him up, it is a name,
you can see is possessive, is Pieter Bruegel the Elder who was a key painter
of the Dutch Renaissance and he is also one of the "old Masters" who understood
suffering in line two of the poem. So that's how far away they're separate and
Auden's doing that on purpose, so if you don't understand who the old Masters are,
you probably weren't supposed to, yet, but now you can make the connection. He's an
old master of painting and here's his
self-portrait. So what is Icarus though? Well, Icarus, you might be familiar with
Icarus, is a Greek myth about a boy and his father, Daedalus who are imprisoned
in a tower and Daedalus is an inventor and he creates these wings for him and
his son so they can jump out of the tower and fly to freedom. But, Daedalus
warns Icarus not to fly too close to the Sun because the wings are made of
beeswax and they will melt, but Icarus does just that, and when they escape, he
takes his freedom too far, flies too close to the Sun, and falls into the water
and dies. So, for the Greeks it's kind of a warning about the dangers of freedom
or maybe not listening to your parents. But for both Auden and Bruegel, that's
not what they're getting at with this story. They're taking a different
approach, and it's a very interesting approach. So you might be wondering, "well
what is his Icarus? What is Brueghel's Icarus?" Well, we know he's a painter, so
you can probably assume it is a painting and in fact, that's what the rest of this
stanza describes: a painting. So this poem is known as an Exphrasis which is a
poem about a visual piece of art. Keats created a number of famous ones; both "On
Reading Chapman's Homer" and "Ode on a Grecian Urn" but Auden's Musee des Beaux Arts"
is perhaps the most famous Exphrasis of the last hundred years - which is
probably why you're reading about it in school or somewhere right now and why I'm
talking about it. So let's look at this painting. I want you to think about a
painting that is called "Landscape with the fall of Icarus" and imagine in your brain
what that would look like: a landscape with Icarus falling from the sky. I'm
wondering if you envisioned this. Because I sure didn't the first time I heard
about this painting. Because you would imagine a painting about the fall of
Icarus would probably have Icarus and and this painting does but he is quite
hard to find. In fact, you have to look in some "untidy" little corner as Auden
points out. Right here is Icarus. So instead of being front and center, he is
tucked away in this little corner. And we might be wondering, "why is that?" Well, it's
really cool because, four hundred years apart,
Breughel and Auden are getting at the same thing, and it has to do with what
that first stanza said about human suffering. Look at how many things from
this painting you can see in the poem: we have the dog with his doggy life, we have
the horse, we have the ploughman, we have the Sun, we have the white legs, Icarus'
legs, and the green water, and we have the expensive delicate ship. So clearly, we
can see that Auden is looking at the painting in order to create the images
of his poem and words as opposed to Breurghel who used paint. So the other
interesting thing about this painting, other than Icarus being tucked away in
the corner, is the composition. Think about where your eyes first looked
the first time you saw this painting. It was probably up, because the bright part
of the painting is at the top not the bottom, and to the left, because both the
horse and many of the people and the ship are all facing or moving in that
direction. So Bruegel is taking our eyes away from Icarus instead of putting him
front and center - he's in this tiny corner and he's encouraging us to not
find him. How does that connect to the first stanza of Auden's poem? Well
sometimes people are suffering, dying even, literally in front of us and we don't notice it- we
just go on with our lives. We're opening a window or walking along or scratching
our butt or hanging out with our dog or whatever it might be, and we don't notice
suffering right in front of us and, and that's a very sad thing, isn't it? And
perhaps the saddest thing, because you can't notice all the suffering in the
world but when it's right there; when it's right in front of your face, do
we sometimes ignore it because, not that we
didn't see it but, we had somewhere to be and we sailed calmly on? Great message to
think about. So let's talk about lasting influence. It has been a major influence on writers,
painters, and students. You can see it at the Musée des Beaux Arts in Brussels, this
painting, and you can sit where Auden sat when he composed it. And it's in a
David Bowie movie! So that is like the pinnacle of, I've never seen that movie,
but I mean it's got to be the pinnacle of inspiration.
But just as Auden was influenced by paintings, many students
have now written poems about paintings because of him. Which i think is quite
cool. So if you have a painting or a statue or something you really, really
like, try capturing it in a poem. Follow Auden's footsteps and while you're at
it pay attention to suffering and have a great day! See you next time. Bye