No matter what the misfortune, there is always some one to whom a human tragedy matters little, or not at all.

W. H. Auden's poem, "Musée des Beaux Arts," is an example of ekphrasis, the embedding of one art form inside another. This poem discusses the painting composed by Pieter Bruegel which depicts Icarus plunging into the sea while a farmer ploughs his fields with head bowed, and a ship courses the waters, inattentive to Icarus as he plunges to his death: 

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....
...and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing,...
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Auden's use of such casual words (as those in bold print) denotes the intractable apathy and casual indifference of humanity to the suffering of others because for them what they are doing is more pressing, more significant, more occupying. Since their personal interests are involved, their engagement in the most mundane of activities takes precedence over even the life and death struggles of strangers.