Auden and Musee des Beaux Arts (1938)

Pieter Breughel: The Fall of Icarus

We all know the story of Icarus, who flew too close to the sun with his waxen wings and fell to his death. Now Auden knew how many are indifferent to the plight of Icarus, and defines it in his poem 'Musee des Beaux Arts'.
This is a poem about indifference of the self, involving the discourse of painting and expressing hopelessness of inadequacy of beliefs of the public and political effects of making a work of art. Claiming that artists have no powers of resistance.
Written at the borders of nazism, Auden uses the story of Icarus to symbolize the sense of what goes on in 1935, who is preoccupied with the horrors of Nazism and who gently turns away.

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 Breughel'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.