Icarus: "We're going to be in the Mediterranean"

I've been listening to the Sullenberger tapes -- the flight controller recordings from the US Air 1539, plane that went down in the Hudson -- and they are riveting. If you haven't heard them yet, listen in here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100280783.

The incident again and again made me think of Auden's "Musee des Beaux-Arts," so here it is, a little early, for Poetry Friday. Certainly I was at my office, walking dully along, when the plane went down a few blocks away.

Musée des Beaux Arts

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.

-W.H. Auden (December 1938)