Musée des Beaux Arts

“Musée des Beaux Arts” is a free-verse poem inspired by the poet’s experience at the museum in Brussels, but the speaker isn’t explicitly identified. The focus is on the artwork and the ideas it provokes—the speaker shares conversational observations as one might do during a leisurely walk through a gallery.

The first line, “About suffering they were never wrong” (Line 1), reveals a central theme of the poem. The straightforward declaration “[a]bout suffering” (Line 1) is immediately complicated by uncertainty because the pronoun’s referent, “The Old Masters” (Line 2), isn’t identified until after the line break. This pattern of mixing seen and unseen, known and unknown, continues throughout the poem.

The Old Masters’ paintings depict suffering—a universal and age-old subject. In a perhaps surprising turn, the speaker suggests that what those artists best understood is suffering’s “human position” (Line 3). Instead of seizing attention, suffering happens amongst ordinary scenes of everyday life, “[w]hile someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along” (Line 4). Not even the extraordinary can easily penetrate the haze of routine and inward focus.

The speaker elaborates on the thought by alluding to Breughel’s painting The Census at Bethlehem—a busy winter scene so filled with figures and details that Joseph and the pregnant Mary nearly blend into the crowd. The speaker compares the elders who are “reverently, passionately waiting / For the miraculous birth” (Lines 5-6) to the children “who did not specially want it to happen” (Line 7). The children aren’t concerned with philosophy, spirituality, or any cosmic-scale questions surrounding human salvation. They are living in the moment, “skating / On a pond at the edge of the wood” (Lines 7-8). The speaker says that “there always must be” (Line 6) this inevitable difference in perspective—even though in the context of the painting, the elders aren’t looking at Mary and Joseph either. No one is. They are occupied with livestock, taxes—the mundane earthly business of the day. Transcendent moments of all kinds are missed, it seems.

The speaker then turns to another painting. This time, the details allude to another Breughel work: Massacre of the Innocents. The Masters “never forgot / That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course” (Lines 9-10), he says. The painting transfers King Herod’s massacre of the babies in Bethlehem to a 16th-century village in the Netherlands around the time of the Eighty Years’ War. The first Christian martyrdom happens “[a]nyhow in a corner, some untidy spot” (Line 11) where dogs “go on with their doggy life” (Line 12) and a horse “[s]cratches its innocent behind on a tree” (Line 13). The animals are incapable of registering the moment’s significance even had they noticed it.

The second stanza focuses discussion on a specific painting, Breughel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. The speaker uses it as an example of the indifference of those who aren’t suffering to those who are—how “everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster” (Lines 14-15). This isn’t some visceral kinetic recoiling from tragedy. It’s slow.

The ploughman in the painting’s foreground, high above the site of the tragedy “may / Have the heard the splash, the forsaken cry” (Lines 15-16). The man, unlike the animals and the children in the first stanza, has the capacity and maturity to understand the pain and loss of the tragedy, “[b]ut for him it was not an important failure” (Line 17). His attention is fixed on his plow and the earth. His labor occupies his attention. The flight and fall of the inventor’s son don’t matter to his immediate, material existence and are ignored.

The speaker notes that the background environment doesn’t register the disaster either. The sun still has its job to do, shining as “it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green / Water” (Lines 18-19). Its heat melted Icarus’s wax wings when he flew too close. Its light highlights the only part of him the painting reveals. Neither effect is intentional or emotional, however.

The “expensive delicate ship” (Line 19) isn’t removed from the tragedy by either scope or distance. It has no plausible excuse for ignoring the event. It is so close to the site of the crash, it “must have seen / Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky” (Lines 19-20). Despite the potential for astonishment, however, the ship doesn’t pause either. It, and its passengers, have places to go. It sails “calmly on” (Line 21).

Icarus’s fall would have been a fast plummet, but the scene the speaker describes is instead “leisurely” (Line 15) and calm. The mythic moment of hubris, the death of a son, passes by with barely a splash.

The human capacity to engage with another’s suffering is limited. It happens on the edges, in the corners—any place where the pain doesn’t have to be directly confronted.

The speaker’s tone throughout has been thoughtful, conversational, and touched with dry wit. It also carries a detachment and, in that distance, perhaps a caution. Appreciating the artwork in a museum and noting all the details in a painting is one thing, recognizing and responding to suffering in the world outside, another.