Musée des Beaux Arts

poem by Auden

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Musée des Beaux Arts, poem by W.H. Auden, published in the collection Another Time (1940). In this two-stanza poem that starts “About suffering they were never wrong,/The Old Masters,” Auden comments on the general indifference to suffering in the world. Written in a tone of critical irony, the poem asserts that anguish is most accurately represented in art as a commonplace feeling and not as a dramatic emotion of tragic proportions.

In the first stanza, the poet observes that tragedy often goes unnoticed and that even “dreadful martyrdom must run its course.” In one example he dryly notes that the horse of a torturer, busy scratching its rump, cares little about its master’s victims. The central image of the second stanza is the Flemish Renaissance painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, which hangs in the Musée des Beaux Arts in Dijon, France. The poet notes how the figures closest to the tragedy, a farmer plowing in the foreground and a passing ship in the midground, seem oblivious to the tiny figure of Icarus plunging into the sea in the lower right corner.

This article was most recently revised and updated by Kathleen Kuiper.