Poetry
Musée des Beaux Arts —W H AUDEN
ABOUT THE POEM:
The basic premise of the poem is response to tragedy. The title refers to the Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels. Auden visited the museum in 1938 and viewed the painting by Brueghel, which the poem is basically about. Generalizing at first, and then going into specifics the poem theme is the apathy with which humans view individual suffering.
