Musee des Beaux Arts

"Musee des Beaux Arts" is one of several poems based upon Pieter Brueghel's painting The Fall of Icarus. The other most famous one is by the American poet William Carlos Williams. Auden's speaker here (like those in many of his poems, suave, understated, ironic--here, as often, in spite of the horrors or desolation he describes) begins by describing several other paintings by the Dutch Old Masters in this imaginary Museum of Fine Arts, using what he says of them to lead into the remarks on the Bruegel painting. In responding to this poem, consider how it relates to the painting, but also discuss its broader message about human suffering.

The poem talks about the continuation of life. How it’s only human to continue on toward the next birth instead of simply mourning the pain and suffering of the time, though the younger generation will never appreciate this while they are young. “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” and how the Dutch masters understood this process well. “About suffering they were never wrong,//The Old Masters: how well they understood//Its human position” Then the speaker concentrates on The Fall of Icarus. The painting is well described and truly, no one is watching the man’s failure. Though his failure was important to him, a situation of life and death that ended in death, it wasn’t important to the average man. “the ploughman may//Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,//But for him it was not an important failure” There is a ship that likely saw the man fly, but no face shows towards Icarus in the water as they still have their own business. “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 away.” Even the sun only showed on Icarus only because it must. “the sun shone//As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green//Water” I feel that the speaker is trying to say that suffering is inevitable and we must take it in stride and look forward to the positive things as opposed to the negative. Though the aged were looking forward to the next birth, they could have just as easily been awaiting their own death.

You get hung up on the age thing (and first painiting) in this reading--isnt the poem more about the "human position" of suffering, about how we all, wrapped up in our own lives and concerns, tend to overlook the suffering of others?

In Memory of W.B. Yeats

Auden wrote (or finished) "In Memory of W.B. Yeats" shortly after Yeats died as an elegy to Yeats (and it is one of the best 20th century elegies). However, like Yeats' "Under Ben Bulben," it's also a poem about poetry. Consider in your response how the poem addresses BOTH things.
Also, after reading "In Memory of W.B. Yeats," go back to Yeats' "Under Ben Bulben" and see if you see any similarities or hear any echoes between the two poems; if so, note those in your response.

The poem starts off with beautifully crafted imagery. It’s as though the whole world mourns Yeats. “The brooks were frozen, the air-ports almost deserted,//And snow disfigured the public statues;//The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day” It’s useful to the speaker that this death did happen in winter as it lends itself so easily to a world in mourning. The next part involving the river flowing and the wolves running however, contradicts this. This then suggests that things continued on, outright calling out that his poetry would continue on regardless of Yeats’ death. “The death of the poet was kept from his poems.”
One of the noticeable points that this and “Under Ben Bulben” seem to have in common is the commentary on calling people to the arts, something Yeats had done at other times as well and is likely an homage to him in this piece as well as a continued call.

With a farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress

A man can only do so much in his life, and should reach for greater, something I recall from “Ben Bulben.” The final lines truly call this to mind: “In the prison of his days//Teacher the free man how to praise.”

Good (and funny) on the setting/mood, and good on one of the main echos of "Ben Bulben," but don't both address and give advice to poets?
Doesn't this poem also say other, more subtle things about the poet and his work than that the work lives on, and what do you think of what this poem says of poetry?