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Essay / Human suffering in the poems of Wh Auden
Suffering is the state of anguish or pain of the one who suffers. Although human suffering is not severe in the modern world that many live in today, it is still present in most places. WH Auden is meticulous for his didactic vision of the timeless aspect of human suffering by exploring in his poems the dichotomy between an individual's pain and society's indifference towards him. “Museum of Fine 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 portrayed by Auden's poignant critique of the dark reality of dehumanization in the early 1900s (and modern times) in both poems where ignorance of human suffering leads to a world devoid of love and care. Say no to plagiarism. . Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”? Get an original essay During the “Museum of Fine Arts”, the poem refers to “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” by Pieter Bruegel, where heterodiegetism The narrator (Auden) looks at the painting and reflects on the universal nature of human suffering and humanity's general apathy towards it unless it affects them personally. WH Auden summarizes the timeless concept of human suffering through the first stanza: “How well they understood/his human position; how it happens / while someone else is eating or opening a window or just / walking boringly. » The pathetic fallacy applied in the stanza juxtaposes the truth of how mundane, everyday actions unfold alongside human suffering, in which Auden indirectly articulates the sad truth about the ease and persistence of suffering that can strike the just and the unjust. To better understand the concept of the poem, Auden deepens his criticism in the second stanza: “In Breughel's Icarus, for example: how everything turns away / Quietly enough from disaster; the plowman may have heard the splash, the abandoned cry, but for him it was not a major failure. The irony applied in "Quietly enough of the disaster" mocks the apathy of humanity towards human suffering, they do not see the importance of immense suffering, therefore, Auden judges how easily humans can ignore the brutal cruelty of it unless it happens to them. . Auden's powerful contribution of auditory and visual imagery in "I heard the splash, the forsaken cry, but to him it was no great failure", illustrates his dismay at the self-centered and lacking characteristics compassion of society. The insensitivity of the plowman towards the drowning boy in the painting of Icarus simultaneously allegorizes the modern world, where when a tragedy happens to others, we tend not to realize it or we prefer to ignore what is happening. pass and focus on what is beneficial to them. Overall, although the esoteric meaning of the poem is difficult to decode, it is easy to argue that Auden explored the concept of human suffering in the poem to identify the callousness of those who did not suffer. Thus, through its strong representation of the concept, it allowed the “Museum of Fine Arts” to transcend overtime and remain relevant. Similar to the “Museum of Fine Arts”, Auden used the “Refugee Blues” to judge the apathy of modern society towards refugees. ' segregation and suffering - Auden did this by recounting in his poem the anti-Semitic fate of the two German Jewish refugees. THE.