Of course, it's quite fair to suggest that Bruegel himself accomplished much the same breaking of the narrative frame in his 1558 painting, though in Bruegel's case at least the marginalization of Icarus is part of a deliberate joke on the viewer. It's we who, in the face of war and injustice, continue steadfastly on our course as if nothing dramatic is happening, just as the "expensive delicate ship. These mundane and perhaps contemporary elements from outside the painting extend the theme of social indifference to include the reader in the present day. But children skating on a pond? And most importantly, where does he get the "untidy spot/ Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse/ Scratches its innocent behind on a tree"? The Crucifixion was a common enough theme for the "Old Masters" such as one would see in this museum in Brussels. While in the first and third stanzas Auden offers a reflection on the painting itself, in the second stanza he seems to wander off topic somewhat. What's interesting about this poem more generally is the way Auden breaks the narrative frame, implicating the viewer of the painting as well as the reader of the poem in the ethical crisis occurring at the margin. The most solid - or most teachable - approach I can think of hinges on the dissonance between words indicating tone: "leisurely" does not go with "disaster," and "amazing" does not go with "calmly." It's in the gap between words describing a single event that you'll find Auden's irony.) (Incidentally, to answer the question of how you can prove the presence of irony to readers unaccustomed to poetry, there isn't any easy formula. Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on. Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Water and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Quite leisurely from the disaster the ploughman mayīut for him it was not an important failure the sun shoneĪs it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waitingįor the miraculous birth, there always must beĬhildren who did not specially want it to happen, skating While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along The Old Masters: how well they understood What should be a story of the spectacular failure of human ambition is represented by Bruegel in a dim corner of the canvas, dwarfed by the scale of a massive landscape, and overlooked by nearly all of the human characters in the painting.Ĭompare the painting to Auden's poem of 1938: Make sure you spot the following element of the painting. And there is a brief bio of Pieter Bruegel the Elder here it places Bruegel in the context of 16th century Flemish narrative painting, marks his Italian training, and indicates the influence of Hieronymus Bosch. You can see a large format version of Bruegel's 1558 painting here. One also encounters Alexander Nemerov's helpful essay in the current issue of Critical Inquiry, which relates the poem to Auden's experiences of the war in China in 1938, and situates the painting in the actual Musée des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. Looking up the poem on the internet, one comes across, first of all, the painting by Bruegel called Landscape and The Fall of Icarus, which inspired Auden. Auden's poem "Musée des Beaux Arts" with a student during office hours recently, specifically the question of how to spot irony (the student had missed it).
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