"Mus'e Des Beaux Arts": An Auden Sonnet

Paper Summary:

This paper looks at both the structure and thematic content of Auden's poem and matches it against the sonnet template. The author then makes the case that Auden's poem, ostensibly a free verse piece, meets much of the criteria of a traditional sonnet.

From the Paper:

"If one were to sample from the world of the sonnet, one would encounter rhyme and recognizable structure. While the structure might vary-from the English form, with its three quatrains and closing couplet, to the Italian sonnet, with its rima biaciata-ordered octave and concluding sestet,-the reader would experience iambic pentameter organized into fourteen lines, each line's closing contributing to the poem's definable rhyming sequence. Even the heroic sonnet with its rebellious extra quatrain would still conform to this strict poetic structure, including the "turn" explained by Paul Fussell as "a logical or emotional shift by which the speaker enables himself to take a new or altered or enlarged view of his subject" (116). W.H. Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts," with its thirteen-line first stanza and eight-line second, does not fulfil either the sonnet's line requirements or its rhyme constraints; both its end rhymes and meter, while present, are chaotic in nature (Auden, 2505) ."

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