Musee des Beaux Arts

A detailed Summary of Musee des Beaux Arts

"The Old Master's; how well they understood it's human position". In Musee des Beaux Arts by W.H. Auden, the "Old Master's" understood that people often turned a blind eye to one another's suffering. It uses an analysis of one art form (paintings) by another (poetry) to make the statement about people's lack of interest in the suffering of others. The poem explores the depth of humanities indifference to one another.

The "Old Masters' understood that death caused much suffering to those whose lives it touched. Although the aged welcomed death, "How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting for the miraculous birth." They understood that often death came to those who didn't particularly wish to die. "There always must be children who did not specially want it to happen, skating on a pond at the edge of the wood." In Peter Bruegel the Elder's painting the Fall of Icarus, the youthful Icarus falls out of the sky and is swept away in death's cold embrace.

e Elder's, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, illustrates this knowledge of humans indifference to their fellow humans suffering poignantly. Although the man plowing his field must have seen Icarus fall into the water, he does nothing because Icaurus' fall and subsequent suffering is unimportant to his life and the task at hand. "The plowman may have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, but for him it was not an important failure." In the painting, Icarus has already fallen from the sky into the bay. You can see his pitiful pale white legs sticking up from the water in the lower right hand corner of the painting. Another witness to Icarus' fall from grace was the magnificent ship that was sailing on the bay. The ship's crewmembers do nothing to rescue Icarus. "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. Because they had something more pressing to do, they ignored the fact that a boy, a fellow human

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 679
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: English

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