Auden Poem for Explication

Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s “The Census at Bethlehem"
-- referred to but unnamed in the first stanza
of Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts"

Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s “Landscape with the Fall
of Icarus" -- mentioned in the second stanza
of Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts"

In case you don't have your Sound and Sense book, here is the first of the two poems you are explicating for Thursday, February 11:

Musée des Beaux Arts
by W.H. Auden

Background note: In December 1938, on a visit to Brussels, W.H. Auden went to the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique (The Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium), which furnished the inspiration for this poem, published in 1940. It was a tense time in Belgium and the world. Madness was afoot in Europe, and many, including Auden, sensed the imminent outbreak of a great conflagration. The culture that had existed in Europe up to that moment would perish and a new one would be born. Some elements of the past would be salvaged, of course. Some aspects of European culture have a knack for surviving conflagrations. (read more here, and about Brueghel's paintings).

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;
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:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

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.

Tip: Consider what the poem says about individual human suffering and the effect (or lack of effect) it has on others or on society. What might the poem suggest a religious acceptance of suffering?