Poets Day! WH Auden’s ‘Musée de Beaux Arts’

I’ve never heard of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. I’ve read about him. Until earlier this week I knew he was a Dutch painter of repute, but little more. But I’ve only read about him; never heard his name spoken, so I’ve no idea how it's pronounced. Wikipedia tells me it’s “BROY-gɘl,” but it also says “also” and then “BROO- gɘl.” You got two, you got none. I doubt the man wandered Flanders mouse-like, answering to a handful of first syllable variations so long as the caller followed with a shwa’d “gel.” At some point he declared a preference.

I read it as rhyming with “frugal,” not that I come across the name that often. I don’t know how W.H. Auden pronounced the name in 1938. He was in Brussels touring a museum that was then known as the Palais des Beaux Arts. The poet was struck by at least three, so he thought, of Bruegel’s paintings—Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, The Census of Bethlehem, and The Massacre of the Innocents—then on display. Nearly sixty years after Auden’s visit, experts would determine that Icarus was in fact a copy by an unknown artist of a lost Bruegel, but Auden died thinking he’d seen the real deal and, given the man’s penchant for rewriting even some of his better works, thank goodness such knowledge didn’t set him to fiddling with the poem inspired by his visit: “Musée de Beaux Arts.”

To be fair, he fiddled a bit. The museum known as the Musée de Beaux Arts was called the Palais des Beaux Arts in 1939. It was under the title “Palais des Beaux Arts” that the poem first appeared in the Spring 1939 issue of New Writing and again in the 1940 collection, Another Time. When the museum became the Musée de Beaux Arts after WWII, Auden or his publishers fiddled, and Palais, having become Musée in fact, did so in print; the poem was retitled “Musée de Beaux Arts” as we know it now. The museum continued in flux. In 2020, yet another name change, this time to Musée Oldmasters, oddly enough using the Anglicized term “oldmasters” instead of “vieux maîtres.” Auden died without knowing about this either, so we receive the poem as it was after the first minor fiddling.

To recap: This week’s poem is by Auden, based on two paintings by a variably pronounced painter, a third formerly ascribed to the painter of the other two but now known to be painted by someone unknown, titled and re-titled after the fashion of an indecisive art gallery. “Musée de Beaux Arts” stands apart from most of Auden’s other great works. He was a formalist, renowned for sonnets, villanelles, ballads, and the like. In “Musée,” he plays against that well-earned reputation. He indulges in free verse, sets rhythm with abbreviated lines and caesura, slips in playful language. It’s not what you expect from him, but it is effective.

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus is the only painting named by Auden, but it is the two unnamed that he addresses first. The writer Scott Horton did a bit of museum display detective work and was good enough to share in his 2008 Harpers article, “Auden’s Musée des Beaux Arts.” He confirms Census and Massacre shared the gallery with Icarus and matches Bruegel’s scenes to Auden’s verse.

Both of Bruegel’s confirmed paintings depict Biblical scenes in contemporary—16th-century Flanders for him—settings. In The Census at Bethlehem, people go about their day unaware that Mary and Joseph are among them, ignorant of the momentous happenings in their midst. As Auden writes (the full poem is below), “…how it takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.” Children play in the snow. The extraordinary appears ordinary. Bruegel paints them as the others. There are no halos or shafts of light identifying the Holy Family.

In the second stanza, Auden considers The Massacre of the Innocents. Of the “miraculous birth,” he writes that children slaughtered by Herod’s men “did not specially want it to happen.” It’s a horrible moment in history, but one suffered specifically. Dogs still play.

Icarus takes us out of Flanders and into the classical past. Icarus drowns in the bottom right corner with his legs kicking above the water’s surface. A ploughman misses the mythical event as he watches his furrows. A shepherd and his dog look up the mountain, possibly on guard against immediate danger from predators. A ship in full sail continues in obedience of orders or in the interest of commerce past the fallen legend. Many sources tell me that we are to see indifference. Man is a selfish creature who doesn’t look beyond his immediate needs. I don’t know that I agree. Rather, not all great events get to be selfish. Despite them, families must eat. The wolves must be kept from the door. Per Wikipedia, there’s a Dutch saying for such an occasion: “And the farmer continued to plough…” We have our own to pick from: “Life goes on,” or “Needs must,” among others.

Run of the mill needs are stubborn. Call it The Fall or biology, we are shackled with needs. No grandeur or horror will change that. The quotidian will insert itself. Struggles don’t fade because something awesome is happening over the hill.

There’s a new Auden biography by Peter Ackroyd, titled simply Auden. Ackroyd’s been chasing Harold Bloom for years now, trying to usurp the latter as our most prolific literary biographer and critic. Despite the breadth of subjects, he’s damned on point as he takes them. It should shock no one that I’m particularly fond of his Ezra Pound and His World (1980). I haven’t picked up Auden, but I’ve been mightily teased to do so by Joseph Epstein’s review in National Review, “The Lofty, Lonely Life of W.H. Auden.”

Auden was a slob. Sorry to wallow in the gossipy muck, but he did in actual muck. From Epstein, and so by extension from Ackroyd, on the places the poet lived: “Tennessee Williams remarked of another that it was ‘fantastically sordid, . . . with beer cans and newspapers all about the floor,’” and “his friend, the composer Nicolas Nabokov, noted ‘the permanent stink of cat piss.’” Piles of papers were everywhere; stains covered carpets and walls. One landlord successfully sued to recoup the cost of cleaning and repair. There’s more about his shaggy clothes, lack of underwear, and inattention to orderly living.

Apparently Ackroyd goes on about the poet’s face. I don’t know if that’s fair. Maybe it was poor living and neglect that left him wrinkled and cracked, or maybe it was genetics. In either case, he looked rough. There were clefts where wrinkles appear as expected, and running against the grain, sharp scar-like fissures made mock-perpendicular charges. His was not an enviable visage. Again from Epstein: “The painter David Hockney asked, ‘If that’s his face, what must his scrotum look like?’”

It was the Epstein article that caused me to reread “Musée des Beaux Arts.” He listed it among the few poems of Auden’s he thinks “pass the test of being intrinsically interesting and memorable.” It struck me after reading the article that the poet of the poem about the insistence of mundane life in the presence of great and momentous events wrote great poetic works—I have a higher opinion of Auden than Epstein expresses—while refusing to attend basic hygienic practices, immune to such insistence.

Musée des Beaux Arts
W.H. Auden (1907-1973)

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 Brueghel’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.

December 1938

[This entry is cross-posted at ordinary-times.com]

Aside: Is it now settled that Van Gough was Van Gogh, and so “Van Goff,” all along?