Musée des Beaux Arts by W. H. Auden
Musée des Beaux Arts by W. H. Auden

Musée des Beaux Arts

W. H. Auden * Track #8 On Another Time

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Musée des Beaux Arts by W. H. Auden

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W. H. Auden
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Pieter Brueghel, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

“Musée des Beaux Arts” (French for “Museum of Fine Arts”) was written in 1938. The title refers to Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique in Brussels, where Auden spent some time looking at Old Master paintings, especially Pieter Breughel’s pain...

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Musée des Beaux Arts Annotated

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

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