There Were Never Wrong About Suffering Meaning

W.H Auden's Musée des Beaux Arts can be read as a dialectical discussion on the nature of suffering. On the one hand the poem acknowledges the momentous nature of suffering to the afflicted individual, and on the other, its apparent incapacity to impress upon observers. My concern in this essay is how the form and content conspire in creating this position, and whether this really is the 'human position ', or perhaps a misplaced universalisation on the part of the poet.
'About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters' (Norton: 1471). The poem begins in a syntactically interesting way; by reversing the verb and noun, the poem slips indirectly into its subject matter. The more conventional, 'The Old Masters were never wrong about suffering'
Auden highlights how Icarus's tragic fall does not impress upon those who see it, Auden writes how 'it was no important failure' to the 'ploughman' (Norton: p.1472), and how, 'the expensive delicate ship', 'must have saw something' (Norton: p.1472) but 'calmly sailed on' (Norton: 1472). The poem picks out from the painting two scenes of labour which are undisturbed by 'something extraordinary' (Norton: p.1472). In this sense, the duty towards the Other, is heedlessly effaced. Auden writes of the ship being 'expensive' (Norton: p.1472), in this sense the ship can be seen to represent 'capital', something which continues to move without disruption. The first stanza describes a 'dreadful martyrdom' (Norton: p.1472) which does not impress upon the children who 'are skating at the edge of a pond' (Norton: p.1472) and the dogs who 'go on with their doggy life' (Norton: p.1472), we have therefore, a scene of leisure and the life of an ontological other which are undisturbed by the extraordinary. Scenes of leisure, commerce and labour are all un-impinged, it's an inditement on a vast breadth of social behaviour. This begs us to ask: do moments of calamity fail to break our everyday routines because there is something wrong with ordinary lives? Or is it just the nature of things that the momentous and everyday sit side by side without any connection between them? The poem is somewhat coldly realistic, it's as if all we can do is acknowledge the unbridgeable gap between normality and suffering -- what is central to you may be an ambivalence to me. However, we might question this outlook, is this really universally 'the human position'? (Norton: 1472). The poem was published in 1940, and written in 1938, a time in which Europe was seeing the growth of fascism and had just lived