Blaine Des Beaux Arts

W.H. Auden – Musée des Beaux Arts

Auden’s poem ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ gives us the poet’s philosophy on Breughel’s painting of the ‘Icarus myth’ from Greek history. The poem is based on many different themes depending on a single aspect (the reader would have to assume that Auden is writing about Breughel’s painting - as referenced in the second stanza).

In this essay, I am going to analyse and identify key themes, structure, language devices, tone, and imagery from W.H. Auden’s pre-Second World War poem ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’.

Auden’s poem is based on what is known as ‘assumed knowledge’. “In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away”. This implies that Auden expects the audience to have seen – or at least heard of – either the painting or the story from Greek mythology. However, it does give insight on an alternative meaning to the prose.
The previous stanza mentions“martyrdom” (dying for something.
i.e. Second World War) which links with the historical context in the poem. “How everything turns away”. This infers that Auden is talking about how Europe ‘turned away’ from what was happening in Nazi Germany during the early 1940s (when the poem was written). In addition, the contrast in words used within the poem (“innocent behind”) are used to juxtapose how W.H. Auden has put the idea of Europe practically ignoring the Holocaust with the Icarus disaster – which is used to illustrate Auden’s opinions and views of what was happening during the 1940s in Second World War
Britain.

‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ includes variations of language devices. The use of sibilance in the poem, “disappearing…passionately…sun shone”, highlights the contrast of the mood in Auden’s prose. This makes it clear that the tone of the poem varies throughout. For instance, the first stanza opens with a drabbed opening (“About suffering”) yet ends with the juxtaposition “innocent behind”. This shows the dissimilarities in the mood throughout the poem.

Auden tends to use fronting to get his point across quicker. “About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters; how well they understood”. This sentence adds an effect by being grounded – it has deliberately been put back-to-front. It gets the theme of the poem across quickly and gives us judgement on the key themes. Therefore, it announces the theme of the poem.

However, one could argue that the theme of the poem is not about war. Alternatively, one can see how the poem is about religion and Jesus – hence the reference to suffering. The mention of “martyrdom” links with how Jesus was believed to have died for our sins.

The structure of the poem is very irregular. The first stanza is a lot longer than the second stanza. This is because Auden wants to state his case before he mentions what the poem is about. “On a pond at the edge of the wood: they never forgot”. The use of enjambment on the sentence highlights the continuation of the poem. Auden is just setting up his hypothesis and uses both enjambment and end stopping to conjure up the idea of using the second verse as a quicker, punchier stanza.

In conclusion, Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ identifies many themes and uses historical context to summarize his own view on Nazi Germany during the time of the poem’s composition. By using language and structural devices in an irregular way, he is able to highlight the contrast in tone and imagery throughout the text.