Musée des Beaux Arts by W.H. Auden (1939)

In the corner of a Bruegel canvas, a pair of white legs vanishes into green water, and no one turns to look. The ploughman keeps his eyes on the furrow. 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. This is what Auden understood, standing in a Brussels gallery: that suffering takes place while someone else is eating, or opening a window, or just walking dully along. About this, he writes, the Old Masters were never wrong, and he proves it in twenty-one unhurried lines that never once raise their voice. The horror is not that Icarus drowns. It is that the world has its back turned and goes on with its afternoon, and that this is simply how it always is. The poem freezes that indifference and holds it in front of you, and then, quietly, asks how often the corner of the painting has been you.