Auden visited the Royal Museums in Brussels, looked at Brueghel's painting of Icarus falling into the sea while a plowman continues plowing, and wrote this poem. Twenty-one lines about how suffering takes place while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along. The casual diction, the almost chatty tone, makes the insight hit harder. It is one of the great ekphrastic poems, but more than that, it captures something essential about human indifference that no amount of moral philosophy could express as well.