POETS READING POETS                                                                                                                                                                                               Poetry Review Winter 2024

 

Musee des Beaux Arts by WH Auden

 

I first read this poem in 1982. One of those rare experiences at school that opens up into something far beyond the classroom. What was this thing? I knew that I’d have to keep coming back to it – and not just for exam revision. Each line seemed to vibrate with meaning other than that which I’d first understood. I didn’t really know what poetry was then but I saw, or heard, suddenly what it could be.

   Auden himself defined poetry as ‘memorable speech’. But there was truth here, and beauty, in the way it articulated what I was beginning to understand as a sixteen-year-old; that the world is full of suffering, about which we know and don't know. And that there doesn’t seem to be much difference either way. We carry on with our lives regardless. We have to, what else can we do? Which begs the question: how can we?

  One of the many things the poem does is create a space. To re-read this poem is to re-enter a room in an art gallery. The floors are polished and shiny, a security guard stands at the door looking down at his shoes and there’s a man (is that a tweed jacket he’s wearing, with faded leather patches at the elbows?) standing in front of a painting, waiting for you to take your place beside him.

  You’re clearly in a Musée des Beaux Arts, the title says so, a calm place surely, one of stillness and reflection. And the voice speaking to you is measured and resigned in its recognition of what appears to be an innate human tendency. You’re being invited to look, and think. Rather than rage or offer solutions, the poem wants merely to frame, or reframe, things so that you might see for yourself what we do. 

  It’s possible the speaker’s apparent composure is masking anger, or despair, at the dreadful inevitability that trawls through the poem, not only of our behaviour (which is not unlike the dogs who ‘go on with their doggy /life’), but also that of the world itself, ‘the sun [that] shone/ As it had to’ and the ship that had ‘somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on’. But it’s that critical final adverb and world-weary clarity of tone that evokes, for me, the poem’s more philosophical stance, allowing it to transcend any particular time. Auden recognised in 1938 (as we appeared to be sleepwalking into yet another period of unimaginable suffering) what Pieter Bruegel the Elder was expressing in around 1558. Before we know it, Auden’s poem will be a hundred years old. It’s hard to imagine things will change. 

   When I read this poem as a teenager I had a vague notion that poetry had to do with expressing a feeling or an experience. What this poem showed me was how astonishingly a thought could be transformed into something – a work of art, I suppose. It was far from artless, of course, but I didn’t know that then. What was so compelling to me was the voice, its quality of wisdom, lightly worn. Perhaps it was the first time I realised how the voice of a poem – the voice we hear inside our heads as we read it, the voice that becomes for the time we read our voice – conveys more than just character or emotion, it carries with it the stance of the speaker, so that we see things for a moment through their eyes, from their ‘human position’.

  Yet the language itself is not complicated. Look at some of the rhymes – be/tree, cry/sky, shone/on – and you might wonder how such a profound meditation could emerge from such simple, seemingly random echoes. See how most of them occur in the second stanza – where the rhyme scheme gets tighter, the line-breaks more pressured – as the speaker hones in on the one painting.

   And look at that fourth line of the first stanza, the long, twenty two-syllable stroll of it (after the more conventional pentameters of the first three lines) intoning the dreary mundane routine of living … followed by the shift to the elders ‘passionately waiting’ for the eruptive miracle. Extremes of engagement, of indifference, happening alongside each other. 

   I’ve always been drawn to the children in this poem, their skating, their nonchalance. Why don’t they want it to happen? Do they resent it as they might the imminent birth of a younger sibling, or is it that they – in their innocence and wisdom – don’t want that birth to happen, for all the trouble it will bring? For what it might mean for them. Never mind, remember that they don’t ‘specially want it’, it’s no big deal, for now it’s enough to be skating on ‘the pond at the edge of the wood’. Pond. Edge Wood. Nowhere is completely safe.

 I love how the poem is like a generous, rambling sonnet, the progress and proportion of its two movements similar to those of the Italian octave and sestet, its comparative looseness allowing more room for the creative expositing of a thinking mind.

  So the poem’s about suffering. Lots of poems are. People suffer. They write about it. Poets like to write about it, about their individual suffering. Understandably, it’s what they know best. But a poem that says ‘This is how I suffer’ can have the effect of drawing a line between the particular nature of that suffering as opposed to another. What this poem does is move away from that subjective, all-important experience – just as Bruegel does with his Icarus, plummeting somewhere in a little corner of the sea – to look not so much at individual suffering as to how we, so often bystanders, react when it’s not ours. Both painting and poem look at suffering as a thing if not endured by us all then at least – and sometimes only barely – witnessed. There’s a lot going on in the world, and in our lives. How can we possibly see, and feel for, it all? 

 What is clear is that both Auden and Bruegel want us to acknowledge the common, the ordinary, in this case the peasant, life, which would have been a hard one, full of its own kind of low-level suffering, with little time to ponder it, let alone enter a museum and reflect on it.

 So there are multiple ‘human positions’ here. The speaker who is, along with us, at one remove from the painting which is itself at one remove from the suffering peasants who are themselves removed from the marvellous or terrifying – singular – act of suffering which is the one we already know about – the myth, the legend, the thing we made up.

 Here is a rearranging of the conventional frame of the art of suffering with Icarus or Christ decentred. Because in actual fact, in reality, it is all of us – or all of them, depending on where you place yourself – who suffer.

  Sometimes, waking up and scrolling through the news to some fresh disaster happening somewhere else in the world I think about how fast asleep I was as it unfolded, how unconscious of this shooting or that bombing. It feels like an example of the poem’s description of how we experience the vast amount of suffering in the world. We literally sleep through it. Because we have lives to get on with, just as the ploughman has furrows to plough, the ship its destination. We have our own sorrows to endure. 

  Has 24/7 news and the internet changed the ‘human position’ of the person speaking in 1938? Has knowing as much as we do affected how we relate to events and other peoples’ pain in any way? I don’t think so. In Bruegel’s paintings there’s a flattening of big and small things, there’s no longer a hierarchy of significance with regards to what is happening. What’s important to you might not be to me. If anything, the fractured attention with which we look at a Bruegel landscape is a bit like how we look at images today on our phones. What should we be paying more attention to? Oh look another bomb in Lebanon, oh look a polar bear stranded on the ice, oh Dolly Parton … oh another bomb.   

  This sense of being at – even keeping – a distance to suffering is central to both poem and painting and is, to an extent, how we in the twenty-first century experience the graphic and wretched misery of millions. For all this incessant exposure don’t we also ‘quite leisurely’ turn away from others’ suffering? What ‘important failures’ do we ignore, or forget about, so we don’t recognise them the next time they come around? 

 Auden’s poem shows us that suffering is part of the human condition, not that we ought to accept or resign ourselves to it, but that sometimes, maybe, the only way we can bear it is to ignore it. Not ignore as in know about it but not do anything about it (which we do) but literally, as the etymology of that word makes clear, not know. We cannot possibly know all the suffering. We scroll, look up, scroll some more. The human position. Our position. 

 

 

Greta Stoddart, October 2024