Musée des Beaux Arts  About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters; how well, they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree. In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water; and 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. -W.H. Auden

The poem is written in free-verse (no regular rhyme or meter) The second stanza seems to tighten up the rhyme, suggesting the theme is placed within it. But then it returns to the random pattern in the last two lines, suggesting that great events are irrelevant to people concerned with their own lives. The poem begins with the statement that the “old masters” were never wrong about suffering. These “old masters” refer to the painters- Breughel in particular. Theme: People are apathetic to the suffering of others illustrated by the juxtaposition of ordinary events with a boy falling from the sky. Auden wrote that "In so far as poetry, or any of the arts, can be said to have an ulterior purpose, it is, by telling the truth, to disenchant and disintoxicate."

Who is Icarus? Icarus was a Greek mythological figure, also known as the son of Daedalus (famous for the Labyrinth of Crete). Icarus and his father were stuck in Crete, because the King of Crete wouldn't let them leave. Daedalus made wings for the both of them and gave his son instruction on how to fly. (Not too close to the sea, the water will soak the wings, and not too close to the sky, the sun will melt them) Icarus didn’t listen and flew too close to the sun, causing the wax that held his wings to his body to melt. Icarus crashed into the sea and died.

Two Views of a Cadaver 1 The day she visited the dissecting room They had four men laid out, black as burnt turkey, Already half unstrung. A vinegary fume Of the death vats clung to them; The white-smocked boys started working. The head of this cadaver had caved in, And she could scarcely make out anything In that rubble of skull plates and old leather. A sallow piece of string held it together. In their jars the snail-nosed babies moon and glow. He hands her the but-out heart like a cracked heirloom. 2 In Brueghel's panorama of smoke and slaughter Two people only are blind to the carrion army: He, afloat in the sea of her blue satin Skirts, sings in the direction Of her bare shoulder, while she bends, Fingering a leaflet of music, over him, Both of them deaf to the fiddle in the hands Of the death's-head shadowing their song. These Flemish lovers flourish; not for long. Yet desolation, stalled in paint, spares the little country Foolish, delicate, in the lower right-hand corner. -Sylvia Plath