In Musée des Beaux Arts, W.H. Auden covers the overlooked struggles of life, and how simultaneously, the simplicities of the common day are still occurring. Auden puts into words the thoughts and feeling that people always have but never know how to say. As always, Auden creates another meditation that rings true for all, and will be thought of as accurate throughout eternity.
Auden validates the natural suffering of life in the first five lines of Musée des Beaux Arts, and how it can go so easily unnoticed. Auden writes, “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;”. Here Auden illustrates …show more content…
“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:,” Auden pens. He explains how people who have already experienced suffering know that it will happen for all. He then goes on to speak of “...the miraculous birth…” The miraculous birth is a controversial concept throughout religion, symbolism, and the process of growing up. One may say that the miraculous birth is an event of enlightenment. How when a baby is born, they are completely unaware of all of the defected yet inescapable troubles of life. For example, Donald Winnicott proposed the theory of “The good enough mother”. This could be shown as when a child is born, they believe that the world revolves all around them, until one time the mother has to go to the bathroom while the baby is hungry. The baby is deprived of what they want, causing them to realize that their mother is not the perfect human that they always thought she was, and that all life does not rotate solely around the child’s needs and wants. Transitioning from the miraculous birth, Auden then goes on to show the corruption of the youth, and how there are children that do not want this to happen. Once again, Auden ties this agony into a time where normal activities are coinciding with the …show more content…
Auden formulates, “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.” Here, Auden tries to point out how blatantly dismissive people can be to those who are even in extreme danger. In this world, humans have been taught to mind their own business, stay to themselves, and think of themselves far before others. For example, if a car gets into an accident, ninety five percent of people will simply continue driving because everyone assumes that someone else will help, when that “someone else” might be having the exact same thought. As Auden says, “...But for him it was not an important failure…” people are very enthralled in their own lives, and for this man who did not account an accident for “not being an important failure,” he is referring to how it does not impact his own life, and how because it does not affect him all too much, he has no urges to be of