Musee des Beaux Arts and Why We Should Read It

I first read W.H. Auden’s Musée des Beaux Arts last year in my English class. I began reading the poem with little enthusiasm because it was just homework. However, I soon found myself caught in the beautiful descriptions of human suffering. The words glided through my brain, but with a strength and honesty I found memorable. I read the poem again, this time with more care, and was in awe at how accurately Auden describes human empathy and the sadness of people forced to suffer alone. Auden cites greatly the painting Fall of Icarus by Pieter Breughel, and it wasn’t until I saw the painting that the full depth of the poem was revealed. Because Auden’s poem Musée des Beaux Arts teaches us so much about our capacity for compassion, I believe every person should read it.

The poem describes with frankness how we deal with the suffering of others. It begins with the straightforward statement, “About suffering they were never wrong.” Auden understood that suffering takes place concurrently with ordinary events, while another person is “eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.” Auden later uses the Greek myth about Icarus’s fall from the sky to describe human reaction to the suffering of others. This theme is best depicted by the line “How everything turns away quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may have heard the splash but for him it was not an important failure.” When reading this line I see myself reflected. As I walk between classes someone’s mother lies dying and as I sit at my laptop someone has just learned they have AIDS. It is sad to admit that I often look past the distress of others the same way the ploughman did. When we suffer we want companionship, someone to reach out and say they understand our pain. Yet so often we look past the pain of others because it does not affect our lives. We don’t see the splash because we choose not to. While we can not live in complete empathy to the extent that we quit living ourselves, we need to make an effort to help others in their time of sorrow. Reading this poem is necessary as hopefully by recognizing ourselves in it, we will be able to reach out with love. And with the tremendous state of sorrow caused by Hurricane Katrina it is crucial that we not turn our backs on our own man falling from the sky.