“Musée des Beaux Arts,” which is French for “museum of fine arts,” is a poem about the universal indifference to human misfortune. Following a series of reflections on how inattentive most people are to the sufferings of others, the poet focuses on a particular rendition of his theme: a sixteenth century painting by the Flemish master Pieter Bruegel, the Elder, called The Fall of Icarus.

W. H. Auden spent the winter of 1938 in Brussels, where he visited the Bruegel alcove of the city’s Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts. “Musée des Beaux Arts” was inspired by the poet’s fascination with the Icarus painting, as well as by two other canvases by Bruegel: The Numbering at Bethlehem and The Massacre of the Innocents. It was written in 1939, when Auden was distressed over the defeat of the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War and the acquiescence of Europeans to the ascendancy of Fascism.

The poem consists of two sections, the first a series of general statements and the second a specific application of those generalizations. Like the great Flemish Renaissance artists, the poet observes how very marginal is individual calamity to the rest of the world. Most others continue with their mundane activities without paying any attention to the kinds of extraordinary events that poets and painters usually dramatize. In particular, instead of highlighting the magnitude of that mythical catastrophe, Bruegel depicts the bizarre disaster of Icarus falling from the sky as if it were peripheral and utterly inconsequential to anything else. Oblivious to what is happening to hapless Icarus, no one and nothing—neither a farmer nor the sun nor a ship—are distracted from proceeding with business as usual.

The second section of “Musée des Beaux Arts” is an abbreviated analysis of the Bruegel work, in which the poet emphasizes how the painter composes his pastoral scene in such a way as to minimalize the significance of a boy’s suddenly plopping into the sea. Except for the obscure background detail of individual death, the landscape might seem idyllic. Auden’s point is a simple one, and, by expressing it simply, succinctly, and nonchalantly, he intensifies the horror of universal apathy.

The first noun in “Musée des Beaux Arts” is “suffering,” yet the poem is constructed to demonstrate that it is only in its own first line and nowhere else in the world that human agony receives any emphasis. Elsewhere in his writing, Auden often employs recondite and archaic words, but in this poem he deliberately restricts himself to a very plain vocabulary. The effect of commonplace phrases is to emphasize the banality of suffering. The poet’s tone is nonchalant, as if to echo the carefree way in which most people ignore the tribulations of others. Passion and reverence are out of place in the kingdom of the blasé.

The reader is told that, at the time of “the miraculous birth” (an allusion to the momentous arrival of Jesus), children were most concerned with ice skating and “did not specially want it to happen.” The use of “specially” rather than “especially” suggests a child’s vocabulary; it projects an air of innocence ominously at odds with the horror the poet feels. Even the reference to ice skating in ancient Palestine is an obvious anachronism, and its flippancy, too, is a deliberate incongruity, designed to call attention to something very wrong: the fact that indeed no one pays attention.

At the end of the first section, the “dreadful martyrdom” of the Crucifixion is undercut by the neighborhood dogs’ “doggy life.” The adjective “doggy” again suggests a childlike vocabulary,...