This is a copy of Brueghel’s Fall of Icarus, a painting by Pieter Brueghel the Elder.

Icarus and his father Daedalus, the architect of the labyrinth of Crete, were trying to escape imprisonment. King Minos thought Daedelus had given away the secret of how to escape the labyrinth thus allowing King Theseus of Athens to escape it. So King Minos imprisoned Daedalus and Icarus.

In an attempt to escape by flying, they put feathers on their arms and stuck them together with wax, but apparently Icarus, in spite of his father’s warning, flew too close to the sun, which melted the wax, and without wings he tumbled back to Earth. You can see him falling into the water just below the ship.

So in the 1500s, Pieter Brueghel included this event in one of his paintings. About 400 years later, W.H. Auden was inspired by this painting to write a poem about human indifference to suffering. Watch for examples of this as you read his famous poem.

Musée des Beaux Arts

By W. H. Auden

December 1938

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters: how well they understood

Its human position; 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 did not specially 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 Brueghel’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 shone

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.

*****

Do you ever wonder what is going on in other parts of the world, while you’re doing something routine at home? Are there people being tortured or mistreated elsewhere in the world at that very moment? Or simply suffering while we are enjoying a good time? Or the other way around, perhaps? Someone having a good time while we suffer?