A boy falls from the sky and a ship sails calmly on, and in that juxtaposition W.H. Auden found the devastating truth about how suffering happens while the rest of the world eats and opens windows. Written in 1938 and published the following year, the poem takes its occasion from Bruegel's painting of Icarus, where drowning legs disappear into a green sea no one on shore notices. Auden's conversational tone is the point: the Old Masters understood that tragedy is never the whole picture, that the torturer's horse scratches its behind on a tree. The genius lies in its refusal of grandeur, its insistence that indifference is not cruelty but the human condition, and that the miraculous is always, for someone nearby, not the important thing.