Musée des Beaux Arts

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1939

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Poem Analysis

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Further Reading & Resources

Related Poems

“In Memory of W. B. Yeats” by W. H. Auden (1940)

Published in From Another Time, the same volume as “Musée des Beaux Arts,” this poem deals with the loss of Yeats. Auden honors the man for his humanity and his artistry. This poem, too, showcases Auden’s versatility and facility with rhymes and style.

“Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” by William Carlos Williams (1962)

This poem takes its inspiration from the same Breughel painting. Both poems feature some key elements of the artwork: the farmer, the sea, and the unnoticed fall. Williams’s style focuses on images. It pares away words to expose their truths.

“Channel Firing” by Thomas Hardy (1914)

Hardy was one of Auden’s early influences. This poem was written in May 1914, three months before the beginning of World War I. The dark, ironic, and satiric poem is a conversation between skeletons and God; the skeletons, having heard a loud noise, fear they’ve been awakened for Judgment Day, but God tells them it was only explosions from guns. The poem is filled with a sense of inevitability, given humanity’s apparent inability to break away from violence, war, and suffering.

“The Shield of Achilles” by W. H. Auden (1955)

This poem reimagines a scene from Homer’s The Iliad where Achilles’s mother, Thetis, watches the god Hephaestos craft armor for her son; instead of glorifying war, the images on the shield are filled with horror, despair, and the numb apathy of those who have become habituated to violence. Like Auden’s earlier work, this poem uses art as a focal point for philosophical questions about humanity’s relationship to war, history, and violence. Additionally, Achilles’s shield in The Iliad is the most famous instance of ekphrasis in Western literary history.

Further Literary Resources

W. H. Auden: A Commentary by John Fuller (2001)

Fuller reviews all the major works of Auden, including his poems, plays, and libretti. Each piece is discussed in detail. Publishing history, important passages, allusions, variations, and sources are given. Fuller also offers critical analysis and interpretations. The poet’s work and life are considered as well. The book is a major revision of the Reader’s Guide to Auden.

“Realigning Modernism: Eliot, Auden, and the Spanish Civil War” by Loris Mirella (1994)

This article from Modern Language Studies examines the effect of the Spanish Civil War—and questions of political engagement—on the work of Eliot and Auden. Both poets were criticized for their apparent “betrayal” of Modernist ideals. Auden became increasingly less detached, and his work’s political charge was sometimes read as a refutation of Modernism’s aesthetic demands for experimentation. The article situates “Musée des Beaux Arts” within Auden’s personal, political, and artistic development.

“Some Reasons for Rhyme in ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’” by P. V. LePage (1973)

This deep dive into the rhyme of Auden’s poem is from The Yearbook of English Studies published by the Modern Humanities Research Association. LePage argues the poem and the Breughel paintings merge the mythic with the ordinary, and he traces how that approach is embodied in the structure of Auden’s poem. He claims “the poem’s appearance as a poem, the dramatic scenes of the fiction, the rhythm of ideas, the poem’s fusion of the poetic and spectacular with the prosaic, all in some way require the rhyme.”