The 1939 poem “Musée des Beaux Arts” by W. H. Auden displays an intertextual relationship with previous works, referencing the classical Greek myth about Icarus and the 16th century painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, which is attributed to Brueghel the Elder. The poem also shows the sense of distance and lack of sentimentality that characterized Modernist writing.

The Roman poet Ovid included the myth about Icarus in his Metamorphoses as a warning against hubris. The inventor Daedalus creates a pair of wax and feather wings in order to escape from the labyrinth on Crete. But during their escape, Icarus flies too close to the sun and the wings melt, causing him to fall into the sea below. The painting by Breughel depicts the fall of Icarus as a farmer, a shepherd, a fisherman, and a ship’s crew pursue their daily routines, each unaware of or indifferent to the boy plummeting into the ocean. Even a normally keen-eyed hawk depicted in the tree above the fisherman doesn’t seem to notice the event.

As an ekphrastic poem, “Musée des Beaux Arts” emphasizes the theme of the indifference people often display toward unusual events and tragedy. The poem’s narrator references Brueghel in the second line as one of “the old Masters” who recognized that human suffering often goes unnoticed. A disaster happens “while someone else is eating or opening a window” and engaged in daily routine. The narrator also notes a difference in how generations regard then unusual: older people expect a “miraculous birth” while children “did not especially want it to happen” and understand “that even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course.”

In the painting, the shepherd’s gaze is directed upward but in the wrong direction, as if he were daydreaming, illustrating the poem’s line “everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster.” Even if the nearby farmer, whose gaze is directed downward as he ploughs, overheard something, “for him it was not an important failure.” This indicates a myopic view of life that focuses only on oneself and not the larger world. The people in the painting, as commented on in the poem, are not interested in lessons that the story of Icarus represents or even in the deeds of other people. They are only intent on their own business.

Auden’s poem underscores the painting with the realization that despite the occurrence of a strange event, life goes on for most people. There is an indifference to tragedy that is, itself, tragic.