Some untidy spot
On W. H. Auden's ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’
Sometimes the most familiar poems are the strangest. In W. H. Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, for instance, the poet uses various paintings to think about suffering’s ‘human position’ - the way in which terrible things take place while the rest of the world gets on with its life. It is one of my favourite poems, and I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve read it. But I never really thought about it as a poem about paintings until I saw the paintings in person.
Perhaps this is as it should be. If a poem about a painting is going to work, it needs to work without you having the painting in front of you, or even having seen it. You can’t read and look at the same time. Auden’s off-hand tone and tightly-wound syntax conjure both the human messiness of the paintings and the moral he draws from them. The picture is in the words.
Then again, ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ isn’t so much a poem about paintings as a poem about being in a gallery - specifically, the Musée royaux des Beaux Arts in Brussels. We’re dropped into the poet’s thoughts as he ambles around the collection. When we visited, I was thinking mostly of Breughel’s The Fall of Icarus - the boy falling out of the sky in the poem’s final lines. Seeing that painting, I figured, would be like encountering the poem. I caught a glimpse of it as soon we entered the room, but decided I would start at the other end - save the best until last. And immediately I was confronted with two paintings which Auden doesn’t name, the paintings which I’d never given a second thought to, but which provide the material for the first stanza. There, suddenly, was the poem.
There were the children skating - the wonderful, silly squat little figures mucking around on the ice in The Numbering at Bethlehem. There, in The Massacre of the Innocents, was the ‘dreadful martyrdom’ - soldiers butchering babies with pikes, while more go door to door and a small body lies in the snow. In the painting, which the Brueghels made several versions of, an event from the New Testament is transposed into a 16th century Flemish village. Herod has ordered that all the children under the age of two in Bethlehem should be killed. The soldiers are Spanish troops and German mercenaries. It is bitterly cold and the roofs are iced like Christmas cakes. The Dutch will soon rebel against the Hapsburgs.
We know that this is the ‘suffering’ that Auden is thinking of because of the pair of dogs just to the right of the violence taking place in the centre. They are so close to the action. They are playfighting. The poem doesn’t mention these things (and there are other dogs) but, once you see them, they feel inevitable, like Auden is just expanding on what the painters have already done.
Elsewhere, Auden seems to use his imagination: none of the paintings include an exact model of the ‘torturer’s horse’. In 1963, Arthur Kinney suggested the most likely candidate was one towards the front of the painting, since it is the only one both with a rider and near a tree (even if a soldier is holding a battering ram in the way of the tree). I wonder if he wasn’t also thinking of the horses at the back of the scene, standing with their heads to the trees they’re tied to, as if they can’t bear to look at what is happening behind them.
Reading it again, it’s surprisingly difficult to marry what the poem announces it is about - that is, suffering - and what is happening in these pictures. The skating children are missing something important, the registration of the baby Jesus, but The Numbering at Bethlehem is only about suffering in the sense that any depiction of Jesus would, for medieval viewers, bring to mind the Crucifixion. Icarus drops out of the sky, but he isn’t suffering long (the sufferer is Icarus’s father).
If ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ is about any one painting, then, in particular it is about The Massacre of the Innocents: Auden’s response to the other paintings is an extension of his response to this one. But Auden isn’t only responding to a painting. This is December 1938. He has seen the civil war in Spain and just got back to Europe from reporting on another war in China. He knows what is happening in Germany. So there is another message, which only becomes clear when you take a step back: suffering is also something that takes place while someone else is moseying around a gallery, looking at paintings.