What is an ekphrastic poem? One famous example is the “Musée des Beaux Arts,” a poem by the British modernist poet W.H. Auden that was inspired by his visit to the fine arts museum in Brussels.
You can access the poem here to follow along. You can also watch my analysis over on YouTube here.
Auden wrote “Musée des Beaux Arts” in 1938 on the cusp of World War II in a world of political unrest. You might imagine that the suffering of the war might have presented an apt backdrop to this poem, which covers the topic of human suffering, but the poem is too leisurely and light to be in reference to a war—it’s set in a museum, after all.
Auden was inspired by a particular painting hanging in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Belgium. It’s a painting by Breughel, one of the most significant Dutch painters of the Dutch Golden Age known for his landscapes scenes.
The painting in question here is Breughel’s Icarus, whose composition is in keeping with what we might expect of Breughel’s dedication to the pastoral landscape. The painting appears in the second stanza of the poem and references one Icarus, the Greek mythological son of Daedalus. If you remember your Greek mythology, or if you’ve studied James Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, whose main character is named after the mythological Daedalus, you’ll remember Daedalus as the creator of the labyrinth that held the half-bull half-human Minotaur. Later on, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Daedalus reappears with his son Icarus and is tasked with creating wings. Because the wings are made of bird’s feathers and beeswax, Daedalus warns Icarus not to fly too close to the sun. Icarus, of course, as any brash Greek hero, disobeys his father’s admonition and flies towards the sun. As we are left to contemplate his hubris, Icarus plummets to the ground, his wings melting under the sun’s heat, and drowns in the sea.
You might thus expect a flamboyant painting that depicts the heroic Icarus ascending towards the sun, perhaps replete with bright reds and yellows, but that’s not the painting we get at all. Instead, we have a verdant landscape with a plowman, feathery green trees, a shepherd with his dog, and ships off in the distance. In a modest corner, we see Icarus’ limbs poke out from the water. And no one seems to notice his descent.
Auden’s poem alludes directly to Breughel’s painting through a literary device called ekphrasis, which allows a poet, through vivid imagery, to put art to words and create a vibrant scene. One of the earliest and maybe most famous examples of ekphrasis can be found in Book 18 of Homer’s epic The Iliad in a description of Achilles’ shield. Auden wrote several ekphrastic poems, and in fact, his other famous ekphrastic poem is his take on Achilles’ shield through the poem “The Shield of Achilles.”
Yet in “Musée des Beaux Arts,” we don’t arrive at the ekphrasis until the latter half of the piece. Instead, we open with the lines “About suffering they were never wrong,” a sentiment that promptly reveals the poem’s subject matter: humanity’s indifference to suffering and its corresponding focus on quotidian life. The poem’s tone mirrors the feeling of Breughel’s painting: its diction creates a quasi-pastoral scene with shepherds and ordinary people going about their day rather than heroic figures falling to their death.
Auden’s poem concerns ordinary human experience, as well as how suffering is a part of everyday life, yet Auden doesn’t negatively judge the rote pace of human life or the more ignorant people who are unaware of the profound suffering around them. He seems to be suggesting that suffering is a typical part of the human experience.
You might notice that our opening line is a bit odd—it’s written in a sort of Yoda speak, with the predicate at the start of the sentence and the subject at the end: “About suffering they were never wrong, the old masters.” Auden liked to break literary conventions: he has many of these convoluted sentences throughout his work; he also loves adverbs: “walking dully along” or “reverently, passionately waiting.” I teach writing to teenagers, and the two rules of writing I always push—write sentences in the simplest, most straightforward way and use adverbs sparingly—are the very rules that Auden chooses to break, reflecting his belief that human beings don’t have to be relegated to a fixed standard. The effect in the poem is something playful or even ordinary—prose that is, perhaps, more innocent.
Certainly, the poem concerns innocence. We witness children who are actively “skating,” ignorant of the more serious and devoted elderly people who are “waiting” for Jesus’ birth. If you note the rhymes, which come at irregular intervals and are somewhat cloaked within the text, you’ll see that the rhymes link ideas together. For instance, “waiting” and “skating” present a contrast between the experience of suffering and the ordinary world. The children don’t care about suffering, for how could they be privy to its existence? And what of the dogs? They go about their life—their “doggy life” (a fun one). The poem is full of enjambment as well—the literary device where one line spils over to the next. Here, the enjambment creates a sense of perpetual motion and reemphasizes Auden’s idea that life goes on—despite all the suffering that comes with it.
In the second stanza, we encounter Breughel’s painting and Auden’s love of ekphrasis. Auden notes how the poem's actors turn leisurely (there’s your adverb again) away from the disaster of Icarus’ fall. The plowman goes about his life; the ships sail calmly on past Icarus drowning in the water.
Does Auden excuse us for ignoring suffering in the world? That is certainly my reading of the poem—Auden seems to be arguing that while it might not be justified to turn a blind eye to suffering, it is certainly natural to go about life in ignorance of it. Auden thus captures a central facet of the human experience: it is ordinary, quotidian—a life without recourse to perils. And maybe, he suggests, that’s all right.
You write about all my favorites! This is spectacular!
Yoda would say "About suffering never wrong they were".
Yoda puts the verb at the end, like Bismarck