“Musee Des Beaux Arts” By W. H. Auden

729 Words3 Pages
“Musee des Beaux Arts” by W. H. Auden (rpt. In Thomas R. Arp and Greg Johnson, Perrine’s Literature: Structure, Sound, and sense, 9th ed. [Boston: Warsworth, 2006] 944-945) is the direct illustration of the painting "Fall of Icarus" by Breughel. The main point of the poem is that the life goes on. The basic meaning of this poetry is that Icarus and his Dad Daedalus were stuck in the Island of Crete because the king of Crete won’t let those two to leave. So, Daedalus comes up with the idea to build some sort of machine that would help them both to escape from Crete. Daedalus makes a flying machine with wings, and gives instructions to his son on how to fly. Daedalus warned his son that if he will fly too close to water, then water will soak the wings, and if he would fly too high, then the sun will melt the wax that held his wings to his body. However, Icarus was stubborn, and did fly too high, close to the sun. Even though his father yelled and warned him, Icarus did not listen to him, and continued to rise in conical form. Finally when he got too close to the sun, the sun caused the wax to melt, which held wings to his body. Icarus lost the control of the machine and started to fall, and he crashed in the sea and died. The main idea of this poem is suffer, miracles and disasters. Life goes on in spite of heights and depths of life. The poem is patterned in two stanzas in iambic, anapestic quarto meter. The division of these two stanzas in this poem is corresponding to the real life, and the painting. In the first stanza, the author tells about real life, of how the life goes on, and everybody takes his or her own place in this world, whether they are satisfied or not. As the poet mentions in the lines five through seven of how some couples wait for the miraculous birth while out there some children who did not wanted it to happen. For some people birth is a

More about “Musee Des Beaux Arts” By W. H. Auden

Open Document