Tragedy, from a Distance: Portraying Artistic Detachment in "Musee des Beaux Arts" Amelie Maurice-Jones 12th Grade

In ‘Musee des Beaux Arts’, W.H Auden explores human responses towards tragedy across the cultures through the setting details of paintings within the ‘Musee des Beaux Arts’. Whilst the poem might be read as an ode to human resilience in the face of tragedy, the consistent fluctuating description between the tragic event and commonplace activities suggests that humans can never truly detach themselves from disaster. Furthermore, the dissonance between the theme of high culture and the simplistic format of the poem is created by Auden to criticise tendency of the ‘old’ artistic ‘Masters’ to disassociate emotionally from the tragic events they paint.

Auden, throughout the verse, uses frequent allusions to the external world of the ‘Musee’, to present both humanity and natural forces as able to overpower the suffering caused by tragic events, yet, nonetheless, neither are shown to be utterly separable from tragedy. There is a semantic field of everyday activity throughout the poem, including and most notably the described actions of people during a tragic event, albeit that be ‘eating or opening a window or just walking dully along’. Here, the catalogue of present participles paired with the form of list is indicative of the...