WH Auden "Musee des Beaux Arts" Poem Animation Movie
Heres a virtual movie of WH Auden reading his much loved poem "Musee des Beaux Arts"
W.H. Auden's best known poem 'Musee des Beaux Arts' is about the reaction of people to the suffering of other persons and the relation of art to human response to suffering. The poem makes a reference to the mythological character Icarus who falls to the ocean after the wax wings made by his father Daedalus melt, and who subsequently drowns. 'Musee des Beaux Arts' and its portrayal of human apathy to suffering, the physical universe and redemptive death are evaluated.
You can see the painting he is refering to here..
http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/bruegel/icarus.jpg
Kind Regards
Jim Clark
All rights are reserved on this video recording copyright Jim Clark 2008
Musee des Beaux Arts W.H. Auden
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.