A brown-skinned African is the highest and the most heroic figure on the raft, who by the report, was the first to site the rescue ship Argus. The painting shows the moment when the possibility of rescue becomes visible to the remaining fifteen out of more than a hundred-fifty of the Medusa’s crew who have already perished-mostly by drowning, though some were actually eaten by their fellows. The lines above might very possibly be taken as comments on a monstrously skillful, overstated painting by a twenty-seven-year-old who became famous because of it. The men in the painting are not only fishermen but also shipwrecked sailors crowding on a raft. The poem is about the exaggerations of fishermen, telling about the one that didn’t get away-not a fish, but rather a boat to safety. Auden, The Quest, XIX (The Waters) Īuden’s lines have often struck me as a slant reference to Théodore Géricault’s painting in the Louvre, The Raft of the Medusa (1818).
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