Sherry Chandler

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Musée des Beaux Arts

Breughel's "The Fall of Icarus"

What did I notice in my week of close regard for W. H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts”? (Full text here)

The poem has a modified sonnet structure. This fact has been pointed out. Although it’s an important nicety that a number of online reproductions of the poem skip, it’s printed in two verse paragraphs in both my old Norton’s Anthology and my copy of Selected Poetry of W. H. Auden (Modern Library, 1959). (Sold for $2.95 according to the dust cover.) You can see from the accompanying autograph from the Library of Congress, Auden himself meant the poem to have two paragraphs. (Click image for full-sized version.)

Many words on the web about the poem’s thematic content and it’s relationship to Auden’s conversion to Christianity. How, for example, the “forsaken” cry of Icarus is like Christ’s cry from the cross “Why has thou forsaken me?”

Little is written, online at least, about the poem’s form. Nevertheless, it is noticed that, even though it is in free verse and runs over 14 lines and cannot be a sonnet, it has a sonnet-like structure with a turn at line 14.

I love that turn because it really wants you to notice that it’s a turn. It tells you. Like the torturer’s horse, it seems like a little joke in this otherwise somewhat ponderous poem:

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance, how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster;

This turn, however, is toward the disaster, at least as it is realized by “The Fall of Icarus.”

Note please how that “quite leisurely” slows you down. You cannot say that complicated combination of sounds without rolling it a bit on your tongue.

It seems to me that a poem that goes this far to remind you of a sonnet must have very conscious intentions on the sonnet form. So I decided to look at its numerology. The octet of this poem is 13 lines long, the sestet is 8. Twenty-one lines altogether, and of course 21, like 14, is a multiple of seven. But more interesting, 13 and 8 are consecutive numbers in the Fibonacci sequence and thus are proportionately satisfying just as a sonnet is.

So I think I’m going to call it a free verse sonnet.

What else? Well, it’s peppered with adverbs: dully, reverently, passionately, specially, leisurely, calmly, and the oddballs just and quite. Adverbs are stacked twice: just walking dully along and reverently, passionately waiting.

I suppose you might say that it’s thus salted with adjectives: its human position, the miraculous birth, the dreadful martyrdom, some untidy spot, the forsaken cry, an important failure, and the best of all, the expensive, delicate ship. The adjectives in these phrases seem more important than the nouns to me.

And prepositional phrases: skating / on a pond at the edge of the wood and the sun shone / As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green / Water.

The effect of all this, and the liberal use of long open vowels, is to slow the mouth down so that we walk a somewhat ponderous Promenade through these Pictures at an Exhibition.

And yet I think the poem has its fair amount of whimsy. That use of specially in Children who did not specially want it to happen, the doggy life of the dogs, innocent behind of the torturer’s horse, that self-named turn, and even the expensive delicacy of the ship all seem playful, even humorous to me.

I think this is not often considered a funny poem. I don’t think it’s a funny poem. But poets are always playing, I think, even at their most serious. Even on the verge of religious conversion.

Oh one other small thing. Two phrases I find very hard to say: just walking dully along and the torturer’s horse. I find myself wanting to redact that torturer to an executioner just because I find it hard to get my tongue and teeth straightened out saying it.

The upcoming week is set to be a distracting one and I have not yet completely mastered the Auden, so I thought I might turn to Dickinson for my next poem. Her work tends to the short and some breathelessness might be fun after Auden’s long periods. So I opened my Final Harvest (Little, Brown 1961) at random and found one of my favorites (#640 in the complete poems):