Some Reasons for Rhyme in 'Muse des Beaux Arts'

Author(s): P. V. LePage
Reviewed work(s):
Source: The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 3 (1973), pp. 253-258
Published by: Modern Humanities Research Association
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Some Reasons for
Rhyme
in 'Musee des Beaux Arts'
Rhymes, meters, stanza-forms, etc.,
are like servants. If the master is fair
enough
to win their
affection and firm
enough
to command their
respect,
the result is an
orderly happy
house-
hold. If he is too
tyrannical, they give notice;
if he lacks
authority, they
become
slovenly,
impertinent,
drunk and dishonest.
W.
.
Auden
W. H. Auden1
A
poem
is a
rite;
hence its formal and ritualistic character. Its use of
language
is
deliberately
and
ostentatiously
different from talk. Even when it
employs
the diction and
rhythms
of
conversation,
it
employs
them as a deliberate
informality, presupposing
the norm with
which
they
are intended to contrast. W.H. Auden2
W. H. Auden2
Passing by,
one
might
comment that 'Musee des Beaux Arts' is too
deliberately
informal,
that the master so lacks
authority
that the
rhymes
and other servants not
only give impertinent
notice but are
unnecessary
and
slovenly
at the same
time;
if the
poet
had turned the lines to
prose
and
dropped
the
capitalization
of
verse,
this
might easily
be
part
of an
essay
on 'The Indifference of the Universe as
Portrayed by
Pieter
Brueghel
the Elder'. The comment would be
wrong.
The
poem
does
employ
the diction and
rhythms
of
conversation,3
but with delicate deliberate-
ness. It is an
orderly
household;
the
rhyme
is
pertinent
and
necessary.
I look first at the exterior. The
poem
has a
staged four-part
dramatic structure.
In the first
scene,
the
speaker
makes a
general
observation about a
group
of artists
as he stands in the middle of one museum chamber:
About
suffering they
were never
wrong,
The Old Masters: how well
they
understood
Its human
position;
how it takes
place
While someone else is
eating
or
opening
a window or
just walking dully along.4
In Scene
Two,
the
speaker
walks
up
to one unnamed but
particular painting
to
specify
his
opening
remark:5
1
'Writing',
from The
Dyer's
Hand
(New York, 1962), p. 22; originally published
as a
part
of
'Squares
and
Oblongs'
in Poets at
Work,
edited
by
Charles B. Abbott
(New York, 1948), p. 17I.
2
'Making, Knowing
and
Judging',
from The
Dyer's Hand, p. 58.
3
Robert Roth discusses the conversational
tone,
the
'thoroughly
modern
temper'
and
'sophisticated
reserve',
in 'The
Sophistication
of W. H. Auden: A Sketch in
Longian Method', MP, 48 (1951),
193-204.
4
Quotations, by permission
of Messrs Faber and Faber
Ltd,
are from Collected Shorter Poems:
I927-1957 (London, 1966), pp. 123-4.
5
Arthur F.
Kinney
discusses several
paintings by Brueghel
that these lines and the
following
five
might
refer
to;
he concludes that the narrator is
looking specifically
at
Brueghel's
The
Numbering
at Bethlehem and Massacre
of
the Innocents as well as
Landscape
with the Fall
of
Icarus
(College English, 24
(1963), 529-3
).
Auden
probably
knew these
paintings
at the time he wrote the
poem,
as Mr
Kinney
argues;
The Numbering
at Bethlehem and a
copy
of Massacre
of
the Innocents
hang
with the Icarus at the
Brussels
Royal
Museum
(Palais
des Musees
Royaux
de Peinture et de
Sculpture;
the
poem
first
appeared
with the title 'Palais des Beaux
Arts').
Even
though
the
poet
means to
suggest paintings
like
these, however,
I do not believe he means to limit the
early general descriptions
in the
poem
to
specific paintings.
There is in fact no one
painting
that has all the elements he
gives
to the
paintings
described in lines
5-I3.
There
are,
for
instance,
no
'aged reverently, passionately waiting |
For the
miraculous birth' in The
Numbering
at
Bethlehem, though
a lot of
people
are bunched
together waiting
to
pay
their taxes and to
get
rooms for the
night, among
them
Mary
and
Joseph;
the
pond
where the
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254
Rhyme
in Auden's 'Musee des Beaux Arts'
How,
when the
aged
are
reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous
birth,
there
always
must be
Children who did not
specially
want it to
happen, skating
On a
pond
at the
edge
of the wood.
'And over
here',
he
remarks,
another work
particularizing
his initial
generalization:
They
never
forgot
That even the dreadful
martyrdom
must run its course
Anyhow
in a
corner,
some
untidy spot
Where the
dogs go
on with their
doggy
life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
The
logical arrangement
is
generalization
to
particularization,
the dramatic
sequence
a man
focusing
in from a whole room of
paintings
to two or three works
considered
generally;
then in Scene Four he
stops
before
Brueghel's portrayal
of
worldly indifference, Landscape
with the Fall
of
Icarus:
In
Brueghel's Icarus,
for instance: how
everything
turns
away
Quite leisurely
from the
disaster;
the
ploughman may
Have heard the
splash,
the forsaken
cry,
But for him it was not an
important failure;
the sun shone
As it had to on the white
legs disappearing
into the
green
Water;
and the
expensive
delicate
ship
that must have seen
Something amazing,
a
boy falling
out of the
sky,
Had somewhere to
get
to and sailed
calmly
on.
The idea of the
poem
is to dramatize the anomalous
merging
of
great 'poetic'
events and
mundane, prosaic, daily affairs,
the same
merging
that
Brueghel
and
the Old Masters verified in their
paintings
-
sufferings,
miraculous
births,
martyrdoms, myths
woven
through
the fabric of
ordinary
life. Thus the rather
continuous
prose-seeming appearance
of the
poem:
the visual cadence is an
image
of the anomalous
merging,
the 'lines' of the
poem continuing
on
despite
the ends of
lines. There are two sentences and seven
end-stopped lines,
the
syntactical
break
marking
the division between
generalization
and
particularization,
the other
closures
dividing
the
scenes;
the rest of the
poem
is
enjambed.
The look of the
children
play
is in the bottom
right
corner of the
painting,
but it seems to be situated
very
near the
town
centre;
there are a few trees but no 'wood' in The
Numbering
at Bethlehem. There are no horses
scratching
their innocent behinds on trees in The Massacre
of
the
Innocents;
there are several
dogs
and
perhaps
two dozen horses in the
painting,
several horses
scratching
their heads on
buildings
and
trees,
but none is in an
appropriate position
to do what the
poem
describes. The Massacre
of
the Innocents
does not
portray
a 'dreadful
martyrdom';
it
portrays
a dreadful massacre. The Procession to
Calvary
by Brueghel might
as
easily
be the referent in lines
9-I3;
it has all the elements mentioned in the
poem
-
a horse
scratching
its
behind,
an
untidy spot
with a
great
clutter of
people,
a corner for
Calvary, dogs,
a man
chasing
his
hat,
someone
walking dully along,
children
playing,
the
family
of
Christ
reverently, passionately waiting.
In The Adoration
of
the
Kings
in the Snow there is a child
skating
near the Bethlehem stable while the
aged kings
are
reverently, passionately waiting
to see the Christ
child. In
short,
the
paintings
described
generally
in lines
I-13 bring together
details from several
different
paintings.
The
only
work Auden
specifies
is
Brueghel's Landscape
with the Fall
of Icarus,
and I
think it is the
only specific painting
he wanted his reader to have in mind. He
selects,
of
course,
only
a few details from the
work, ignoring
the
shepherd
and his
sheep,
the fisherman
sitting perhaps
fifteen feet
away
from the fallen
Icarus,
several other
ships,
a castle ruin in the
sea,
a sea town in the
background,
the
corpse lying
in the bushes near the
ploughman's
field. Gustav Gliick comments
that this
corpse, by
the
way,
is meant
by Brueghel
to illustrate the German
proverb,
'Es bleibt kein
Pflug
stehen um eines Menschen
willen,
da stirbt': 'No
plough
comes to a standstill because a man
has died': see his Pieter
Brueghel
the Elder
(Paris, 1936), p. 24, plates 7
and
8;
also Marcel
Fryns,
Pierre
Brueghel
L'Ancien
(Paris, 1964),
and F.
Grossman, Brueghel:
The
Paintings. Complete
Edition
(London, 1966), especially pp. 189-90
and
plates 3, 3a, 63-74,
and 120.
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P. V. LEPAGE
poem
seems to
imply
that the
poet
has
haphazardly
cut a
prose
statement
up
into
lines of
verse;
the
poem begins
with three
decasyllabic lines,
four accents to the
line,
but line
4 explodes
that
pattern;
the rest of the
poem
seems an
unpredictable
combination of
accentual-syllabic-metrical
free
verse, surely
an anomalous
merging.
I discuss the metrical
'system'
later on.
The conflict of ideas in 'Musee des Beaux Arts' is between the
poetic
and the
prosaic, great
events and
everyday things;
four
groupings
make
up
the conflict:
Scene i
Suffering
a. someone else
eating
b. or
opening
a window
c. or
just walking dully along
Scene 2 The Miraculous Birth children
skating
on a
pond
at the
edge
of the wood
Scene
3
The Dreadful
Martyrdom
a.
dogs going
on with their
doggy
life
b. a horse
scratching
its behind
Scene
4
The Fall of Icarus a. a
ploughman ploughing
b. the sun
shining
as it had to
c. an
expensive
delicate
ship, having
somewhere to
get to, sailing calmly
on
Obviously,
the movement of the
great
events of the
poem
is toward the
specific,
working
from
(i)
the
general
idea of human
suffering,
to
(2)
a
particular
kind of
suffering (the
labour
pains
of mothers
giving birth, perhaps
of
Mary
or some other
famous
mother),
to
(3)
a more
particularized
and dreadful
suffering,
the death of
a
martyr
who chooses to die in order to witness for a
belief,
to
(4)
a
particular
death
resulting
from a
particular
deliberate act: Daedalus warned Icarus to
keep
away
from the
Sun;
the
boy
chose to
ignore
his father and therefore lost his
wings.
The movement of
spectacular
events in the
poem
then is from events where the
actors had little choice to events where
things happened
because the actors chose to
have them
happen.
The movement of
everyday
affairs is
contrariwise,
that
is,
from activities that
someone chooses to
perform
to activities where the actors have no choice. The
prosy
side of the
poem
has two movements from active to
passive
in the two
strophes.
In the first the
sequence
is from
people
who choose when
they
are
going
to
eat and when
they
are
going
to
open
a
window,
when
they
are
going
to take dull
walks;
to children who have less choice about when
they
are
going
to skate on a
pond
(ice, skates, willing guardians
all
participate
in the
decision);
the
dogs
have
no choice nor does the horse. The
ploughman
in the second
part
of the mundane
sequence might
have chosen to be a
shepherd
or a fisherman or a
painter,
but
having
chosen
agriculture,
he must
plough
at a certain season and he must
get
it
done before he can do the next
thing;
there is no time to muse about sea
splashes
and cadavers in the
bushes;
the sun has no choice about
shining;
the
ship
-
ironically given personification
and therefore choice
-
has the least choice of
anything
in the
poem, despite
its
preciousness.
In the matter of
choice,
in
short,
the
sequence
of
significant
events criss-crosses
the
sequences
of mundane affairs.
Nothing
in the
poem
has
complete
freedom of
255
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256 Rhyme
in Auden's 'Musee des Beaux Arts'
choice, however,
neither Icarus nor the man
eating
his lunch.
All,
more or
less,
are
the creatures of external
influence,
seasonal or
psychological (all
sons
rebel),
or
psychodynamic
or natural. The
point
is that the 'more or less' has a
pattern,
the
effect of which is to force the
prosaic
and the
poetic
actions into coalescence:
the
pattern
of ideas in 'Musee des Beaux Arts'
poetizes
the
insights
of the Old
Masters. I
ply
the
things apart
here
only
to
point
out
why they
are so fused
together
in the
poem.
The verse itself is
part
of this
poetization. Judson Jerome
remarks that most
distinctions between
prose
and verse involve matters of
degree:
We can
say
that
good prose
is
rhythmic disorder, always threatening order; good
verse is
rhythmic
order
always threatening
disorder. Prose has a cadence
you
can
hear,
but too much
regularity
is
apt
to offend the ear. The last sentence is bad
prose;
the threat of order was
carried out. It is not
very good
verse either .. The threat of disorder overwhelms the
promise
of order.'
The verse of'Musee des Beaux Arts' makes few
promises
at the
beginning except
for
the
vague
visual threat of its
being
a
poem.
I scan the work as
good prose
almost
seeming
to
carry
out the threat of
order;
the
poem
turns
slowly
in its two
strophes
into a faint metrical
pattern
of mixed iambic and
anapestic feet;
one
begins
to feel
the
pattern
near the end of each of the four scenes:
syllables
accents
About
suffering they
were never
wrong, Io
4
The Old Masters: how well
they
understood Io
4
Its human
position;
how it takes
place
Io
4
V,
/ V /
kV /
J )
/ VV
/
V u V
*While someone else is
eating
or
opening
a window or
just
22 8
/ v / v/ I
walking dully along;
/ v
v / v / v v /
v v / v
How,
when the
aged
are
reverently, passionately waiting 14 5
For the miraculous
birth,
there
always
must be
12
3
/ V / VV / /
Children who did not
specially
want it to
happen, skating 14 5
v v / v v / vv /
*On a
pond
at the
edge
of the wood:
9 3
They
never
forgot
5 3
That even the dreadful
martyrdom
must run its course
13 5
Anyhow
in a
corner,
some
untidy spot I1 4
v v / v/ v v /v/ v v
*Where the
dogs go
on with their
doggy
life and the
15
6
/,' /
torturer's horse
/ v v / vu v / vu /
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
11
4
1
Poetry:
Pre-Meditated Art
(New York, I969), p. 63.
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P. V. LEPAGE
257
syllables
accents
In
Brueghel's Icarus,
for instance: how
everything
turns
away I5
6
/ v /
Quite leisurely
from the
disaster;
the
ploughman may 13 4
/ ) / _ / v /
*Have heard the
splash,
the forsaken
cry, 9 4
j / I
Il/ iv
/ / k_
But for him it was not an
important failure;
the sun shone
I5
6
As it had to on the white
legs disappearing
into the
green
I6 6
v
. v
/
v
/vv
/ v / v v
*Water;
and the
expensive
delicate
ship
that must have seen
I5 5
/
j % / v
v
/ k I /
v
/
*Something amazing,
a
boy falling
out of the
sky,
I2
5
v / V v
/
V
/ /
Had somewhere to
get
to and sailed
calmly
on. I
5
One reads
along
and the
poem
does not seem to have a
purposive pattern
of
syllable,
accent,
or
metre,
and then
gradually
it seems to be
assuming
a verse
shape,
and
yet
one cannot find a name for it or
any pattern
to it. If one connects versification with
the
spectacular
and the
poetic
and
prose
with the
prosy
events of
life,
then the lack
of metre combined somehow with a metre or a hint of metre is another
part
of the
plot
in 'Musee des Beaux Arts'
-
to
join inseparably together
the news-
worthy
and the
everyday,
the stuff of
poetry
and the stuff of life.
Likewise with the
rhyme.
The first time one reads the
poem
there is little or no
audible
rhyme.
One
perhaps
sees that
'waiting'
and
'skating' rhyme.
One
perhaps
hears
'wrong'
in the first line
faintly
chime with
'along'
in the
fourth,
perhaps
'forgot'
with
'spot'
in the ninth and eleventh
lines; 'away'
and
'may'
in lines four-
teen and fifteen seem to make more sound than
any pair
of
rhyme
words before
-
though
the lines are
enjambed,
both words are
accented;
'green'
and 'seen' make
the fact of
rhyme
visual,
if not audible. The scheme never rises above
seeming
haphazardness
in
any reading
of the
poem,
and the
haphazardness again helps
to
give
the work the same
feeling
that the other
comminglings
of the
poem convey:
the
merging
of
great poetic
events with
prosaic everyday
events.
Just
as
life,
as seen
by
the Old
Masters,
has its random
episodes
of
suffering
and
archetypal events,
so
the
poem
has its random
episodes
of
rhyme:
the
poem
does not seem to
rhyme;
then we see and hear some
rhymes
and
yet
cannot find a
purposive pattern.
The
rhymes help
to secure the
commingling
of
great
events and
ordinary
life because
they
make
alogical synonyms
of
'passionately waiting'
and
'skating', 'They
never
forgot'
and 'some
untidy spot', 'everything
turns
away'
and 'the
ploughman may',
fusing together
not
only great
events and
everyday affairs,
but also the Old
Masters,
the truth
they
saw and did not
forget,
the mundane and
spectacular subjects
of their
paintings,
and us.
The
rhyme
also marks off the four sections of the
poem,
but so that the dramatic
divisions are not too
distinctly made,
the first two sections have
rhymes
that connect
them to the
following sections, though
one
hardly
hears the connexions:
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258 Rhyme
in Auden's 'Musee des Beaux Arts'
(i)
a
end-stopped (ii)
c
(iii)
e
(iv) g
b d f
g
x no
partner
c e h
end-stopped
a
end-stopped
b
end-stopped
f i
half-rhyme
d
end-stopped j
J
h
end-stopped
i
end-stopped
half-rhyme
The
rhyme
is
part
of the tone of the
poem, part
of the
poetized pattern
of
puzzling
and
apparently
irrelevant details that characterize the Old Masters'
paintings,
especially Brueghel's
treatment of Icarus. There is no scheme that will allow the
reader to
predict
when the next
rhyme
will
occur, just
as there is no
way
to
predict
when some
great event,
in the midst of our
daily prose,
will take
place, just
as there
is no scheme to
explain why Brueghel
includes
every
detail he does include in his
generic paintings.
The civilized tone of 'Musee des Beaux Arts'
-
discussed
by
Robert Roth
-
is
tinged
with
irony,
and the
rhyme
is ironic:
arbitrary
and
casual;
it seems
simply
to
happen,
so the
poet
lets it
happen
and
goes
on. The
poem
is a
twenty-one
line
sonnet,
the octave and sestet
considerably
stretched
by
the
mundane details. The
rhyme
is a kind of
joke
that can be taken
seriously.
The
joke
is that one never
quite
hears it but sees
it,
in a
poem
that does not
rhyme
but
rhymes.
The
appearance
of the
poem
as a
poem,
the dramatic scenes of the
fiction,
the
rhythm
of
ideas,
the
poet's
fusion of the
poetic
and
spectacular
with the
prosaic,
all in some
way require
the
rhyme.
It is one of the servants of a
happy
household.
CINCINNATI P. V. LEPAGE
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