Musée des Beaux Arts Suffering Quotes

Auden's being pretty clever here. By delaying our sense of who the subject of this phrase is, he allows the first line to ring out as a universal truth – which is, in fact, what the Old Masters are trying to do. And by crowning the world's favorite artists as Old Masters, Auden only underscores his point. These people, after all, became famous for a reason. Maybe they had something worth saying, after all.

What exactly is so dreadful about this martyrdom, anyway? As far as we can tell, the only thing that makes it so awful is that it seems to be ignored by everyone. In fact, maybe the ignoring is what makes this a martyrdom. Hmm…

Why bother with disaster? It's just so fatiguing. Auden's speaker drips with sarcasm here…because who would turn "leisurely" away from a drowning person? Unless, of course, they don't recognize the disaster as such. Perception's such a tricky thing, isn't it?

The "forsaken" nature of this fall is really what changes an unfortunate accident into outright suffering. Too often, it seems, other peoples' attention can turn a nasty accident into a lucky break – or not.

There's a certain casualness to this description – even though we'll eventually get the whole story, Auden's speaker treats it with the same nonchalance that he imagines for the other figures in the painting.

Yup. That's bad, all right. But notice how Auden always tempers his descriptions of awful things with strange adjectives? They make disaster seem spectacular – if not outright exciting. Which is why we say that there's a healthy dose of irony in his perspective, come to think of it.