Musée des Beaux Arts by W. H. Auden Essay

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The lines are enjambed with phrases stopping in the middle of new lines and lines spilling into other lines. The lines do not pause to acknowledge the end of sentences like people seldom pause their daily lives to acknowledge the suffering of those around them. Auden also uses bad syntax in the last line of the poem, "had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.” Auden may have chosen to write in this free form to demonstrate that people are so indifferent to what is going on around them that it does not make any difference what form the poem is written in, as it will only be overlooked and not given any attention. The form of the poem allows the reader to consider the ways in which suffering is masked by the frenzy of everyday life and that even the acknowledged suffering of others does not seem to be of any concern to anybody but the sufferer. Auden’s poem is a criticism of human perceptions and how we use them to detect, or suppress human suffering. In the first half of the poem Auden “compares versions of indifference by portraying youth and age, animals, and humans” (Shmoop, 2014). In the first few lines of the poem, Auden comments on the perceptions of the “Old Masters” and how they were never wrong in their discernment of suffering. He then compares the old masters perceptions to the perceptions of children and animals and how they are unaware of,
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