Musée des Beaux Arts Passivity Quotes

Notice how even the action in this poem is actually just…waiting for action? Everything happens offscreen. And we do mean everything.

There's all sorts of things that you can do while ignoring everything else around you. Just in case you missed that point the first time around, Auden offers a list of all of the other things that can dull your brain and bore you into sleepwalking. Heck, just reading about it kills a few of our brain cells. We're guessing that's why it's in the poem!

OK, no one's actually being passive here – or are they? After all, martyrs are usually persecuted. Which means that someone out there is not standing up to support her. Or him. And corners don't tend to hold too many people. Being alone isn't usually a choice, is it?

The total lack of surprise or despair or any of those other emotions that require exclamation marks is pretty striking here. Notice how the speaker doesn't outline precisely who or what it is that's turning away? That leaves just enough space for "everything" to include the poem itself – and, by extension, us as readers.

Deciding what to care about is such a simple process that sometimes we don't even realize that we're doing it. That's probably why Auden chooses a simple farmer (that's the sixteenth-century version of Nascar dads and soccer moms) to be the barometer of ethical responsibility. If he can't figure out when to care, chances are that most other people won't, either.

Is the entire world morally bankrupt? That's sort of what we're left with after reading the second of these excuses about having other stuff to do. Notice how beautiful and pleasant all of the language describing the ship and its actions is? It almost makes the disaster seem surreal…or even mythic. Ironically enough, it was.