Musee's Icarus Auden Meaning

Another Look at Art

(A discussion on three messages from W.H. Auden’s Musee des Beaux Arts)

In life, people often look at the bigger picture, easily bypassing small, less noticed details. This could include so many different topics and include many different life lessons. The focus of humans has turned to always wanting what you don’t have, and by doing that, only looking and focusing inward. W.H. Auden was observing in a Museum and discovered a very intriguing painting with the title, The Fall of Icarus. He made some very interesting observations, and ended up turning what he saw and recognized into this poem. He includes some very interesting notes and points of interest for discussion. In W.H. Auden’s Musee des Beaux Arts, three messages

Auden’s Musee des Beaux Arts is that people in the world don’t care about other’s pains and sufferings, only their own. This message is clearly punched into readers at the end of the poem as the thoughts which combine the painting and the poem come together. Lines 14-21 emphasize this as it reads, “In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance; how everything turns away quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman many have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, not for him it was not an important failure...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.” This account shows that Icarus, a tiny focal point in the picture, was not recognized by a ship or a ploughmen when taking a deep plunge into the water. Surely, they had heard the cry, but neither witnesses seemed to show any interest at all. They were more worried about themselves and what they were doing to even care or show interest in what tragic incident had occurred to Icarus. Auden suggests that this is the nature of a human being. People do not truly care about any other suffering other than their