Museé des Beaux Arts

Question 1

what form is the second part in?

Answer 1

octave

Question 2

Auden starts it with regular pentameter, however

Answer 2

this soon drifts between longer and shorter lines

Question 3

what kind of rhyme scheme is the first stanza?

Answer 3

interlocking, ABCADEDBFCFCE

Question 4

what kind of rhyme scheme is the second stanza?

Answer 4

tight rhyme scheme, AABCDDC

Question 5

this poem is not ____, its moralising is delicate

Answer 5

didactic

Question 6

what kind of description is used?

Answer 6

ekphrastic

Question 7

what is the tone?

Answer 7

measured, precise and matter-of-fact, expository (essayist_

Question 8

what are the prose rhythms like?

Answer 8

the poem itself seems to sometimes walk dully along

Question 9

what is the diction?

Answer 9

proletarian and accessible

Question 10

give an example of where the diction is proletarian and accessible

Answer 10

‘when someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along’

Question 11

what kind of aesthetic does it has in its ability to talk discursively and in an expository manner?

Answer 11

neo-classical eighteenth-century aesthetic

Question 12

perspectivism

Answer 12

any scene borders other scenes

Question 13

‘The sun shone / As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green / Water’

Answer 13

kind of objectivity and naturalism, from the perspective of the aesthetic form the elements of the picture are just elements - colours which have meanings s they are placed in a system of perspectives

Question 14

‘position’

Answer 14

experience is placed in relation to other things; things have meaning in relation to but also with separation with other things.

Question 15

The ploughman in Auden’s account, as in Brueghel’s painting…

Answer 15

has a greater prominence than the heroic, romantic figure plunging into the sea.

Question 16

as the ploughman turns the furrows we are reminded of the ancient classical connection between…

Answer 16

verse (in latin meaning the turning from one line to another) and the shaping action of the plough in creating furrows in the earth, committing the poet as he identifies with the ploughman to a kind of poetry of craft that involves turning away from disaster

Question 17

transitional poem

Answer 17

occupies space between early stage of abstruse, complicated poems and his latter, more conversational period

Question 18

what paintings are depicted?

Answer 18

1. Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
2. The Numbering of Bethlehem
3. The Massacre of the Innocents

Question 19

human indifference, no matter how commonplace, is a _________, a refusal to love one’s neighbour.

Answer 19

moral failure

Question 20

simultaneous narratives are portrayed from afar, each ignorant of the other, but the depiction, despite capturing a whole truth (mountains to flats too), is ___________.

Answer 20

unable to alter the events