Topic > Human suffering in the poems of Wh Auden

Suffering is the state of anguish or pain of those who suffer. While human suffering is not severe in the modern world many live in today, it is still a prominent presence in most places. WH Auden is meticulous in his didactic vision of the timeless aspect of human suffering, exploring in his poems the dichotomy between an individual's pain and society's indifference towards him. “Musee Des Beaux Arts” and “Refugee Blues,” both written in 1939, satirize contemporary society's poor understanding of the human position of suffering. The concept of timeless human suffering was represented by Auden's poignant critique of the sad reality of dehumanization in the early 1900s (and modern times) in the two poems where ignorance of human suffering leads to a world devoid of love and treatment. Say no to plagiarism. . Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay During the course of the "Musee Des Beaux Arts", the poem refers to Pieter Bruegel's "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus", where the heterodiegetic Narrator (Auden) looks at the painting and reflects on the universal nature of suffering human nature and humanity's general apathy towards it unless it affects you personally. WH Auden summarizes the timeless concept of human suffering through the first stanza: “How well they understood/His human position; as it happens/while someone else is eating or opening a window or just/walking dully” The pathetic fallacy applied in the stanza juxtaposes the truth of how mundane, everyday actions play out alongside human suffering, in which Auden indirectly articulates the sad truth about how easily and perpetually suffering can befall both the just and the unjust. To gain a clearer understanding of the poem's concept, Auden further extends his criticism in the second stanza, “In Breughel's Icarus, for example: how everything moves away/Quietly enough from disaster; the farmer may/have heard the thud, the forsaken cry,/but to him it was no major failure. The irony applied in "Pleasant Enough from Disaster" mocks humanity's apathy towards human suffering, they don't see the importance of immense suffering, so Auden judges how easily humans can ignore the brutal cruelty of it unless it occurs on them. . Auden's powerful contribution to auditory and visual imagery in “I heard the splash, the forsaken cry, but to him it was no major failure,” illustrates his dismay at the self-centered and uncompassionate characteristics of society. The farmer's insensitivity towards the drowning boy in the Icarus painting is a parallel allegory of the modern world, where when tragedy happens to others, one tends to be oblivious or prefer to ignore what is happening and focus on what which is beneficial for them. Overall, although the esoteric meaning of the poem is difficult to decode, it is nevertheless easy to say that Auden explored the concept of human suffering in the poem to identify the callousness of those who have not suffered. Thus, due to its strong representation of the concept, it allowed the "Musee Des Beaux Arts" to transcend the extraordinary and maintain its relevance. Similar to the "Musee Des Beaux Arts", Auden used "Refugee Blues" to judge modern society's apathy towards refugees. 'segregation and suffering - Auden did this by recounting in his poetry the anti-Semitic situation of the two German Jewish refugees. The refugee is defined as being; a person who has been exiled from their homeland because of a.