Musée des Beux Arts reading journal

Title analysis:
"Musée des Beux Arts", or Museum of beautiful/fine arts in English is the name of the fine art museum in Brussels, which W.H. Auden must have visited. He liked some of the art there so much that he wrote this 25 line poem about it.

"Storyline" synopsis:
There isn't any story in this poem, it must be said, it is simply Auden describing the people in the background of paintings going about their lives while important events are unfolding to people equally in the background. At first, he says about how the old masters were never wrong when it came to suffering and how it happens while other people are performing mundane acts like opening a window before proceeding to use Breughel's Icarus as an example. To cut a long story short, this poem is a good example of ekphrastic poetry, that is, poetry that describes art.

Themes:
There is only one theme in Musée des Beux Arts, and that is selfishness, as that is the theme to be found in Breughel's Icarus. We would rather carry on ploughing our field than to save a drowning boy.

Miscellaneous points:

• We know that this poem is set in 1940 in Brussels, before the German occupation in May. 
• The poem uses a subjective yet detached voice, the voice of Auden.
• Musée des Beux Arts is written in Free Verse, meaning that the stanzas are of random length with randomly sized lines and, in this case, randomly spaced rhymes. The first stanza lasts 13 lines, the second 1 and the third 8, lines range from 3 to 14 words long and it seems to have a simple A-B-C-A-D-E-D-B-F-G-F-G-E-H-H-I-J-K-K-I-J rhyming scheme.
• There is quite a good example of enjambement here, where a sentence runs down into it's own stanza, a one sentence stanza, no less. The first ends with "Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse" before changing stanza and going on to say that it "Scratches its innocent behind on a tree". There are other uses of enjambement, for example, line 3 to line 4, but none as dramatic as that.