In the poem Musée des Beaux Arts,deals with the "human position" of suffering and?

Question

how both horrible tragedies and pain-filled victories always happen while the rest of the world goes about with "dull," everyday hum-drum activities. 

1. What "miraculous" birth" do you think Auden is referring to in the poem? 

2. What "dreadful martyrdom"?

Auden wrote this poem in 1938.  He had been a British citizen living in England, who then fled to America shortly before this poem was written. 

3. What world events do you think were happening at the time? 

4. What evidence in the poem shows that these events may have been on Auden's mind as he wrote this poem?

Answer 1

There are several Bruegel paintings which hide the main subject of the painting in bustle; the Census at Bethlehem is perhaps the most famous, in which Mary is seen amidst a large crowd in winter with the baby Jesus.  But by no means is this central to all his work: Bruegel's most famous painting is probably the Tower of Babel, in which the tower has problems that are immediately obvious.  Still, it is very interesting an oil painter should set about spending the hundreds of hours necessary to make a good oil painting, and then devote only 5% of the canvas to the titular subject!  It perhaps did not take Bruegel much longer to make the Icarus of the title, than to have a reasonably long lunch.

In some ways this is a post-mediaeval or Reformation idea of casting mythical ideas in human terms; it's also reasonable to argue that the Flemish/Netherlandish history of commerce, urban lifestyles, and democracy, all the way from the late middle ages, lead to this wider and more modern perspective.  Certainly the presence of ships is a typically Dutch emblem of commerce.  This painting, I suppose, is just sixty years before one of the first modern market-bubbles, the tulipomania of the 1630s; this was a hundred years before England's first bubble, the South Sea Bubble in the early 1720s, which focused on Latin American bonds.  But I digress.

1&2) Auden is framing his poem, a little bit oddly, in a more Christian context than the painting, because Icarus's `forsaken cry' is meant to parallel Jesus's, God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?  The allusions to the `miraculous birth' and `dreadful martyrdom' are more direct assertions meant to cement this connexions.

3&4) I don't really see this as a political poem, but you can read the first half particularly as a criticism of, say, Neville Chamberlain's appeasement policy-- the idea that it is easy to ignore suffering.  The political context, of course, is the build-up the World War II and the suffering of many people in the former Weimar Republic.  The famous political poem by Auden is September 1, 1939, about the start of the war; it too focuses on how individual lives go on-- `faces along the bar cling to their average day.'  Auden moved from England to America in the months before the war began, having before trying to drive an ambulance in Spain during the Spanish Civil War.