Musée Des Beaux Arts

Auden makes note of the mundane nature of suffering in his poem Musée De Beaux Arts. "The Old Masters" he mentions must have lived in a world where suffering was more commonplace, and not so taboo. In our society, speaking of suffering that is not one's own is done in hushed tones, so as not to upset anyone who might be listening, or worse still, to pique their interest. We, with our modern medicine and the like are afraid of dying. Back in Breughel's day war was much more common. Disease, famine and pestilence were much more common. Did you know that bedbugs were virtually eliminated in North America by DDT in 1960? Our grandparents grew up in a world where bedbugs were a fact, and not just a cute sounding villain to spook children with.

Auden has an odd number of lines in this poem, and each of them has an end rhyme with another line somewhere, though the intervals are not regular, except for the third line, which ends in the word "place." It is difficult to imagine what, if any significance this decidedly ambiguous word has. Taken in context of the line, "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." Though the contextual meaning is not consistent with this reading of the word place, one can glean from it's solitary and plain nature that a place where suffering happens is not a Special Place, but merely an ordinary one.

Here is the painting, for those curious: http://img85.imageshack.us/i/icarus.jpg/