On a visit to the Museum of Fine Arts (Brussels), Auden's attention was caught by a work of the sixteenth century Flemish artist Pieter Bruegel - 'The Fall of Icarus'. The personal tragedy of Icarus, depicted in a small corner of the painting, appears to be of no concern to the progress of everyday life elsewhere in the work.

'The nature of life', observes Owen Shears as he reads this poem, 'is that suffering will always go on and it isn't always in the centre of the painting or the centre of the screen, but it is its nature to go on in the corners of life'.

Auden observes:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position…

In the casual, conversational style of free verse, Auden decries how, generally and astonishingly, man allows his habitual everyday personal preoccupations to blind him to the suffering of others. He questions our ethics in this insensitive, apathetic acceptance.

While acknowledging the universality of Auden's theme, Michael Donaghy informs us that 'Auden wrote this in December of 1938, just after Neville Chamberlain and the rest of Europe had sacrificed Czechoslovakia to Hitler to buy peace. He has seen Europe turn away quite leisurely from these disasters, so I think this is a very angry poem'. Auden's obituary in 'The Times' (01.10.1973) recognised that 'We owe to him above all our sense that the greatest poetry must observe, absorb and criticise the public events and social conditions of its own time'.

www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/bruegel/icarus.jpg
Compare Auden's poem with Bruegel's painting, 'The Fall of Icarus':