Musée des Beaux Arts by W.H. Auden

See painting here

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 Brueghel'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. WH Auden See also: Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by William Carlos Williams Other poems on Icarus are available here.

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by William Carlos Williams

Source: Wikipedia

According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring

a farmer was ploughing

his field
the whole pageantry

of the year was

awake tingling
near

the edge of the sea

concerned
with itself

sweating in the sun

that melted
the wings' wax

unsignificantly

off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed

this was
Icarus drowning

(see also: Musee des Beaux Arts by W.H. Auden)

Other poems on Icarus can be found here.