Musée des Beaux Arts (poem)

When Auden visited the museum he would have seen a number of the paintings of the "Old Masters" referred to in the second line of the poem, including the Landscape with the Fall of Icarus which at the time was still regarded as an original by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

But the museum rebranded itself after World War II as (in French) Musée des Beaux Arts, and Auden's various publishers switched to this name as the title of the poem.

Auden's free verse poem is divided into two parts, the first of which describes scenes of "suffering" and "dreadful martyrdom" which rarely break into our quotidian routines: "While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully / along."

The second half of the poem refers, through the poetic device of ekphrasis, to the painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (c. 1560s), at the time thought to be by Bruegel, but now usually regarded as an early copy of a lost work.

Auden's description allows us to visualize this specific moment and instance of the indifference of others to a distant individual's suffering, inconsequent to them, "how everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster ... the white legs disappearing into the green."

"[7] The painting depicts Mary and Joseph center right, she on a donkey bundled up for the snow of Bruegel's Flanders, and he leading with a red hat and long carpenter's saw over his shoulder.

[citation needed] With respect to Auden's language we can see here "the dreadful martyrdom must run its course" (the innocent boys of Herod's wrath are traditionally considered the first of the Christian martyrs).

There is also a Flemish proverb (of the sort imaged in other works by Bruegel): "And the farmer continued to plough..." ("En de boer ... hij ploegde voort") pointing out the indifference of people to fellow men's suffering.

This poem and the painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus appear side-by-side 22 minutes into the 1976 film, The Man Who Fell to Earth, starring David Bowie.