Lines 14-21 of “Musée des Beaux Arts?

Question

Do you think Auden has correctly

interpreted Bruegel’s painting?

Answer 1

"Correctly" seems to imply that there is a right and wrong interpretation of this painting. However, there would be no way of demonstrating that. Auden's interpretation works, though, doesn't it?

Was Brueghel's point in "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" that momentous happenings occur while others do not care and that even significant religious events occur in the same indifferent context? Brueghel left no notes or diaries to read, and even he might not have understood his real intentions.

When one looks at the painting, the figure in the sea is quite incidental. This may not be the way Brueghel usually works. In Brueghel's "The Triumph of Death," in the Prado, the point about death's winning over screams in every square inch of the picture. In "Peasant Dance," the main figures are front and center. On the other hand, if you wanted to make the point that big events happen while dogs go on with their doggie lives and torturers' horses scratch the innocent behinds on trees, how else would you do it?

This is an interesting (and irregularly rhymed!) poem of Auden's--only one of two I can think of where Auden deals with painting. It seems to have been the art that least appealed to him.