Discuss the key themes presented in W.H. Auden’s poem ‘Musee des Beaux Arts’

Musee des Beaux Arts employs a form of ekphrasis in order to illuminate and critique the policy of appeasement adopted by Britain and France in the late 1930s. Auden describes Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s painting ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus’. He identifies how the painting is primarily concerned with suffering as the poem starts ‘about suffering they were never wrong’. Auden interprets Brueghel as arguing that the fate of an individual is not ‘an important failure’ for agriculture and trade (as a bad harvest or a sunken ship is), and thus is often marginalized and forgotten - and this is worrying. Auden observes ‘how everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster’ - of Icarus falling to his death.

Like Icarus whom plunges in to the sea unnoticed and marginalised, the Jews suffering is not acknowledged by those in Britain and France. The irregular line length employed in the poem creates an illusory casualness of argument. Also, in choosing to use free verse, Auden evokes an unsettling sense of the quotidian. Auden suggests that ignorance is itself a political act. For Auden, it is the role of the artist to make us aware of this fact.