The Full Text of “Musée des Beaux Arts”
The Full Text of “Musée des Beaux Arts”
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“Musée des Beaux Arts” Introduction
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W. H. Auden wrote “Musée des Beaux Arts” in December 1938 following a visit to the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique (a.k.a. Belgium's Royal Museums of Fine Arts). The poem's speaker walks through a gallery, contemplating various paintings and admiring their ability to convey the “human position” towards suffering—that is, indifference. The poem is an example of ekphrasis: the speaker coolly describes the paintings, calling attention to figures carrying on with their lives in the face of violence and disaster. The speaker focuses specifically on Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, in which Icarus, the mythical figure famous for flying too close to the sun and then drowning, appears only in the corner of the painting as a pair of legs sticking out from the water’s surface.
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“Musée des Beaux Arts” Summary
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While perusing a gallery filled with works by celebrated pre-19th-century painters, the speaker notes that these artists accurately portray suffering—especially humankind's attitude towards the suffering of others. The speaker expands on this idea by alluding to The Census at Bethlehem, a painting by Flemish Renaissance artist Pieter Breughel the Elder, and remarking that suffering occurs while people go about their everyday lives. Indeed, the speaker calls attention to people eating, someone opening a window, and others simply walking about—all while a pregnant Mary and Joseph arrive to register in the census. The speaker notes that, while older individuals eagerly anticipate the birth of Christ, there will always be other, younger people who are not particularly awaiting such an event—like the children in the painting, who play games and skate on a pond by a wooded area. According to the speaker, the artists are mindful that violence is carried out in some secluded, chaotic area as life goes on around it. Here, the speaker references The Massacre of the Innocents, which pictures the killing of the first Christian martyrs. In this painting, animals indifferently carry on as the killing happens—dogs doing doglike things, and the horse of one slaughterer innocently scratching its rear on a tree.
As a specific example of this phenomenon, the speaker points out yet another Breughel painting, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, noting that everything in the picture seems to disregard Icarus's violent death. The farmer who drives a plow in the painting's foreground might have heard Icarus plunge into the water and cry out, according to the speaker, but the event is unimportant to him. The sun in the painting continues to shine as it must. The speaker draws attention to its reflection on Icarus’s pale legs as they descend into the murky water. The speaker concludes the poem with the image of a luxurious ship, which must have witnessed Icarus falling from the sky but had a journey to make and therefore sailed smoothly onward.
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“Musée des Beaux Arts” Themes
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Human Indifference to Suffering
The speaker of “Musée des Beaux Arts” walks around a gallery, contemplating works of art by some of the greatest painters of generations past (namely Pieter Breughel the Elder and Breughel the Younger). The speaker retells two iconic stories that the paintings depict, the birth of Christ and the fall of Icarus, calling attention to the ignorance and indifference of the scenes' onlookers. The poem suggests that the "position" of suffering in human lives is at the margins; people would rather not confront, or are outright numb to, the immediate reality of another's pain.
The speaker begins by insisting that the "Old Masters" (acclaimed, pre-19th century European painters) understood suffering like no one else. Suffering, their work implies, is something that's always happening yet doesn't affect anyone who's not in its direct orbit.
Illustrating this idea, the speaker turns to various paintings in which bystanders can be seen going about their lives even as terrible events are taking place. The speaker alludes to Massacre of the Innocents, for example, a painting that depicts the biblical story of the slaughter of male children under the age of two by Herod, King of Judea. The speaker points out the dogs that “go on with their doggy life” and the horse of one of Herod’s men that “Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.” The speaker juxtaposes these images of suffering and mundanity to emphasize the tendency of life to continue in the face of incredible violence.
The speaker then turns to a scene whose bystanders are well aware of the suffering taking place in front of them and still turn a blind eye: Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. This painting alludes to a Greek myth in which a boy named Icarus is given wings made of feathers and held together with wax. After flying too close to the sun, Icarus's wings melt. He falls to the ocean and drowns.
Despite appearing the title of Brueghel's painting, it's pretty hard to actually spot Icarus in this "landscape"! The drowning boy is relegated to a corner, identifiable only by his legs sticking out of the water. Meanwhile, the sun keeps shining, ships keep sailing, and a ploughman keeps pulling his plow.
The speaker latches onto this sense of cold indifference. The ploughman, the speaker muses, “may / Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry” but decided it wasn't important enough to stop his work; “it was not an important failure” in his mind. The speaker adds that the sun “shone / [a]s it had to”—beating down as though nothing has changed despite causing Icarus’s death. Finally, the speaker points out a “ship that must have seen” the "amazing" sight of Icarus falling but thought it best to continue on its journey; the ship (and the people on it) had places to be and "sailed calmly on," unperturbed by this tragedy.
Suffering is so common that it can feel utterly ordinary, the poem ultimately suggests, yet there's a human tendency to avoid looking at this mundane reality directly.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-21
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Musée des Beaux Arts”
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Lines 1-4
About suffering they ...
... walking dully along;The speaker opens the poem by immediately establishing its setting: the poem takes place in the Oldmasters Museum, one of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium. And right away, the speaker makes a statement about the painters in this museum that will guide the rest of the poem: the Old Masters (that is, highly skilled European artists who produced works before the 19th century) always understood how people respond to suffering (that is, they understood its "position" in people's lives).
The speaker's unconventional syntax (essentially, its arrangement of words) calls readers' attention to the word "suffering," placing it near the beginning of the poem's opening line. The description of the Old Masters as “never wrong,” rather than always right, also gives the poem a slightly pessimistic bent from the get-go.
The speaker then clarifies the “position” of suffering in human life: “it takes place,” the speaker says, while people are simply going about their lives. One person might be in pain while “someone else” is going through the motions of life: “eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.”
The polysyndeton of this line (that repeated “or”) creates a kind of piling up effect; readers get the sense that the speaker could insert any number of actions into this list because people fill their days with any number of repetitive, mundane, even boring (note the word “dully" above) activities.
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Lines 5-8
How, when the ...
... of the wood: -
Lines 9-13
They never forgot ...
... on a tree. -
Lines 14-17
In Breughel's Icarus, ...
... an important failure; -
Lines 17-21
the sun shone ...
... sailed calmly on.
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“Musée des Beaux Arts” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Allusion
The speaker alludes to three paintings hanging in the Musées des Beaux Arts attributed (at the time) to Pieter Breughel the Elder, one of the foremost figures of the Northern Renaissance. This was an artistic movement that took place in the Netherlands during the 16th century. It took inspiration from the Italian Renaissance, particularly its interest in antiquity and natural landscapes as well as its use of perspective and realism (all of which figure into the paintings described).
However, due to the Protestant Reformation, artists of the Northern Renaissance were largely disillusioned with the highly idealized imagery associated with the Catholic Church. Images of the Northern Renaissance are therefore more representative of daily life and resist classical Greek and Roman motifs.
It's easy to see how this movement—which champions realistic depictions of everyday life and resists the idealization of antiquity—is consistent with the speaker’s message. Breughel the Elder himself is most known for his banal treatment of mythology, which downplays the heroes of popular narratives and instead focuses on the everyday life unfolding around them. He also pioneered sprawling landscapes that feature masses of people, clustered into smaller vignettes that are set side-by-side.
Lines 4-8 specifically describe The Census at Bethlehem, which depicts a scene from the Bible’s New Testament:
- As the nativity story goes, a virgin named Mary is pregnant with the son of God, conceived through his Holy Spirit. She and her husband, Joseph, travel to his hometown of Bethlehem, as they are required to do because a census has been ordered. The town is therefore very crowded, so the family stays in a humble manger, where Jesus Christ is born.
- In the center of Brueghel's painting, a blue-veiled Mary rides a donkey led by Joseph. The speaker does not focus on this image, of course. Instead, they draw attention to kids skating on a nearby pond.
The remainder of the stanza alludes to The Massacre of the Innocents, continuing the biblical story:
- Herod, King of Judea, hears that a savior has been born and feels that his power is under threat. He orders his soldiers to slaughter all boys under two in Bethlehem’s vicinity.
- Again, the speaker downplays the significance of this moment, calling attention to the oblivious animals pictured rather than the terrible violence of this event.
Finally, the poem’s second stanza refers to Breughel's painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, in turn alluding to the Greek myth of Icarus:
- The myth tells of a boy named Icarus, trapped in a tower with his father, Daedalus. Daedalus, a skilled inventor, fashions two pairs of wings made of feathers, wax, and string so that they can escape. Icarus flies too close to the sun, however, which melts his wings; Icarus falls down to the ocean and drowns.
- The speaker refers to this incident as “the disaster” and mentions “the splash, the forsaken cry” that must have resulted from his fall. While the speaker does introduce mild images of Icarus’s suffering (“white legs disappearing” and “a boy falling out of the sky”), the poem's emphasis remains on the townspeople who witness his death and simply go on with their day.
Where allusion appears in the poem:- Lines 4-8
- Lines 10-13
- Lines 14-21
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Caesura
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Consonance
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Enjambment
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Juxtaposition
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Personification
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Parallelism
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Understatement
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"Musée des Beaux Arts" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Musée des Beaux Arts
- The Old Masters
- Position
- Dully
- Reverently
- Miraculous Birth
- Specially
- Wood
- Martyrdom
- Breughel’s Icarus
- Leisurely
- Ploughman
- Forsaken
- Shone
- Amazing
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(Location in poem: )
A shortened version of Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique or the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, a network of art museums in Brussels. The particular museum referenced in this poem is known as the Oldmasters Museum, founded by Napolean Bonaparte in 1801.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Musée des Beaux Arts”
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Form
This free verse poem is divided into two stanzas—a 13-line stanza followed by an 8-line stanza, or octave. The lines vary greatly in length, containing anywhere from 5 to 22 syllables. Most lines are enjambed, meaning that line breaks occur in the middle of sentences and phrases. All of this adds to the poem's casual, thoughtful, and ultimately detached tone.
The stanza break marks a jump in time and place from ancient Bethlehem to ancient Greece, going back at least a few hundred years. As a result, the break also marks a shift to a new iconography and set of references—from the biblical to the classical.
Note, too, that each stanza is composed of one very long, syntactically complex sentence. As such, the poem comes across as an internal monologue prompted by the paintings—as if it's written in a stream of consciousness style (albeit a pretty polished one). The long length of certain lines also makes them appear to drone on. This is the case with line 4 ("While someone [...] along;") and line 12 ("Where the dogs [...] horse"), for example, which describe life carrying on amid historic suffering. The speaker’s unhurried cadence thus mimics the bored demeanor of the figures described.
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Meter
This poem is written in free verse, meaning it doesn't follow a regular meter. This adds to its thoughtful, conversational tone. Readers get the sense that the speaker is relaying their thoughts in real-time, moving through this museum and noting their observations of certain paintings as they pass by them.
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Rhyme Scheme
This poem does not stick to any conventional rhyme scheme. It does use plenty of end rhyme, but these rhymes appear in a seemingly random, unexpected pattern.
The first stanza's rhyme scheme is:
ABCADEDBFGFGE
And the second stanza's rhyme scheme is:
AABCDDBC
Because most lines break in the middle of sentences and phrases, where there is no natural pause, and because the rhymes are often separated by a few lines, end rhymes aren't all the noticeable on a first reading of the poem. In other words, the rhymes appear erratically and arbitrarily and fail to attract considerable attention at the time of their arrival—much like the historic episodes of suffering that the poem describes!
That said, the rhyming pairs are generally closer to one another in the second stanza than they are in the first. As a result, they're more noticeable, slowing the reader down as the poem draws to a close. They also lend the final lines a sense of completion, as if the stanza has been neatly wrapped up.
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“Musée des Beaux Arts” Speaker
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Very little information is revealed about the speaker over the course of the poem. Biographical details such as the speaker’s age, gender, and occupation are unknown. All readers know is that the speaker is visiting an art museum—specifically the Oldmasters Museum, part of the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique in Brussels, Belgium. This fact is the only thread that directly ties the speaker to the poet, as Auden traveled to Brussels and visited the museum shortly before writing this poem.
The speaker spends much of the poem pointing out specific details within the paintings that line the gallery. The speaker's long, complex sentences and conversational rhythms lend the poem a relaxed, informal atmosphere; it feels as though the speaker is perusing the paintings and working out an analysis in real-time. The speaker’s tone is also quite detached, suggesting this person's emotional distance from the suffering on display.
In fact, the speaker only obliquely references the episodes of violence that the paintings depict. The mass slaughter of children is called “dreadful martyrdom,” for example, and Icarus’s death is simply “the disaster.” Such a cool, removed tone allows the poem itself to exemplify the indifference to suffering that the speaker articulates.
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“Musée des Beaux Arts” Setting
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The poem takes place in the Oldmasters Museum, housed in the main building of the Musées Royaux des Beaux Arts de Belgique in Brussels, Belgium. The poem’s title is an abridged form of the museum’s name, emphasizing the poem's focus: the "Beaux Arts," or Fine Arts. The speaker clarifies the setting by mentioning the Old Masters in line 2 and referencing specific paintings housed in the museum.
Readers can easily envision the poem's speaker drifting through this setting, stopping to focus on specific paintings and describe them to the reader. And by considering the vignettes highlighted throughout the poem, both the speaker and the reader become onlookers to historic events. The reader is transported into the painted landscapes themselves, gaining insight into what it might’ve been like to have been a bystander during one of the incidents represented. The reader thus has firsthand encounters with indifferent spectators—both the speaker and the townspeople. Moreover, the diversity of settings—ancient Bethlehem and Jerusalem, classical Greece, and 20th-century Belgium—suggests that human apathy towards the suffering of others is universal, consistent across time and place.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Musée des Beaux Arts”
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Literary Context
One of Auden’s most famous poems, “Musée des Beaux Arts” first appeared in the magazine New Writing in its Spring 1939 issue. It was later collected in Auden's book Another Time, published in 1940. Some critics see “Musée des Beaux Arts” as a precursor for Auden's Pulitzer Prize-winning long poem The Age of Anxiety (1948); both works explore the ways in which people attempt to diffuse their intense anxieties about the world around them—especially its moral and political challenges.
Auden was a great proponent of old poetic forms, plain and approachable language, and light verse: poetry, he believed, didn't have to be highfalutin to be serious and meaningful. His own poems often deal with death and suffering in a voice that's equal parts crisp, witty, and melancholic. But he also delighted in writing everything from pantoums to villanelles to scandalous limericks. “Musée des Beaux Arts” isn’t Auden’s only ekphrastic poem (that is, a poem that describes a work of art), either. His poem “The Shield of Achilles,” first published in 1952, was inspired by Homer’s Iliad and is another of his most famous works.
Auden was hardly the only poet to tackle the myth of Icarus; in fact, he wasn't even the only poet to focus specifically on Brueghel's painted depiction of this myth! The modernist William Carlos Williams also published a poem called “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” about two decades after Auden’s poem on the subject. Its speaker takes a similar perspective to that of Auden’s, using a starkly different style.
Auden had such a distinctive and unusual poetic voice that many critics see him as a school of his own: he and his contemporaries Cecil Day-Lewis, Stephen Spender, Christopher Isherwood, and Louis MacNeice are sometimes classed together as the "Auden group."
Historical Context
Auden composed “Musée des Beaux Arts” in December of 1938, less than a year before the start of World War II. During this time, geopolitical tensions mounted as various conflicts broke out around the world, illuminating divisions amongst the political ideologies of different world powers.
Auden had witnessed two such conflicts shortly before writing this poem. He had recently spent six months in China during the Second Sino-Japanese War, a brutal conflict that has been cited as a key instigator of World War II. Like many other young leftists, Auden also traveled to Spain during the Spanish Civil War to support the Republic (see “Spain,” one of his most celebrated poems). Many read this poem as, in part, a reaction to the bloodshed that the young poet witnessed during his travels and which he wrote about extensively.
Austria had been earlier in 1938 annexed by Nazi Germany, which was becoming increasingly militarized. As global frictions intensified, the outbreak of a major conflict seemed inevitable to Auden. In fact, he immigrated to the United States partly for this reason in the month after “Musée des Beaux Arts” was written.
Auden’s firsthand experience as a witness to historic episodes of violence is felt in this poem, as are his anxieties about war and its moral implications. Indeed, upon observing immense suffering, the poem’s speaker fixates on “its human position”—the tendency of people to turn away and life to carry on.
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More “Musée des Beaux Arts” Resources
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External Resources
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Brueghel and Auden — A blog post from Harper's Magazine provides a more detailed look at the paintings described, in the context of Auden's poem.
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Biography of Auden — A detailed account of Auden's life and work from the Poetry Foundation.
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Analysis of "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" — A close, multi-media analysis of Brueghel's famous painting from Google Arts and Culture.
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Archival Auden Material — Scans of primary sources related to Auden's work, including letters, photographs, and books that are relevant to the poem.
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The Story of Icarus — A retelling of the famous Greek myth from TED-Ed.
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Pieter Breughel the Elder — A broad overview of the painter's works, including a discussion of Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.
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Auden Reads "Musée des Beaux Arts" — Listen to a recording of the author reading the poem.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by W. H. Auden
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