The Fall of Icarus

"Fall of Icarus" by Pieter Bruegel

W. H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters; how it takes place

while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

for the miraculous birth, there always must be

Children who especially did not want it to happen, 

skating on a pond at the edge of the wood:

They never forgot

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course.

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Bruegel's Icarus, for instance:

how everything turns away

quite leisurely from the disaster;

the ploughman may have heard the splash,

the forsaken cry;

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun

shown as it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.