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Musee Des Beaux Arts

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Arguably one of the greatest writers of the modernist era was Wystan Hugh Auden. A world renowned poet, Auden constructed some of the most popular pieces of poetic literature including "The Unknown Citizen", "September 1, 1939", and "As I Walked Out One Evening". However, the piece which I have based my original poem of of is "Musee des Beaux Arts". This is a piece of ekphrasis poetry. This means that the poem consists of a detailed and graphic description of a visual work of art. In the case of Auden, He has based his poetic piece on "Fall of Icarus", by the 16th century artist, Brueghel the Elder. The artwork shows a normal coastal area, with farmers tending to the land, shepards looking after their flock, wooden ships sailing to and from …show more content…

Auden comments on this, expressing his views on "Musee des Beaux Arts" as well as Brueghels other paintings, and how they refer to the apathy of human suffering and the mindset of continuing onwards, despite tragedy. In order to create an appropriate pastiche of Auden's style and topic, I have chosen to write an ekphrastic poem on Brueghels "The Hunters in the Snow" otherwise known as "The Return of the Hunters." This was the first piece in a set of paintings commissioned for Brueghel to create called: "The Series of the Months", which is why it is regarded as January within the collection. I have also noted this within my poem, with the first sentence of the piece being incomplete, signalled by the ellipsis. This is also seen at the conclusion of my poem, with another ellipsis signalling an incomplete sentence. I have done this to express the continuity of my poem, as if it is a part of a larger piece, much like January is with the rest of the 12 …show more content…

The next 4 lines describe the message presented in Brueghels painting, which is that people will continue on, despite hardships and difficult situations. In the painting, the tragedy is the lack of food and game retrieved by a pack of hunters and their dogs, despite the size of the town and the number of citizens that rely on them. This is due to the temperature and the climate of the season, with many animals hibernating, and being difficult to find within the snow covered land. I was also able to represent this sense of continuity within the structure of the poem, stretching the large sentence over multiple lines with limited punctuation. Lines 8 and 9 are intertextual allusions to the artistic piece that Auden based his poem off of, "Fall of Icarus". I mention the sailing boats and the farmers that continue on with their task, despite the tragedy of Icarus drowning in the sea. I have done this as it is not only relevant to the artwork that my poem is based off of, but Auden did the same thing In his poem "Musee des Beaux Arts". He

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